The Delaware Court of Chancery, known as the nation’s business court,  has now done something it had apparently never done before in its 222 years â€" issue an arrest warrant.
The warrant is for Huey Shen Wu of Newark, Del., who has been accused by his former employer of using trade secrets he learned while working on its trademark Gore-Tex polymer fabrics.
His former employer, W.L. Gore & Associates, brought the lawsuit in the court, which attracts numerous companies that incorporated in the state.  The chancery  judges, without juries, sort out civil business disputes.
A warrant from the court is an unusual, if not unprecedented, event, said Kenneth Lagowski, a chancery office administrator for 29 years. He said there were no records of another arrest warrant being issued in the chancery’s long history.
Wilmington-based court Vice Chancellor Donald Parsons Jr., took earlier this week after Mr. Wu failed to comply with earlier court orders and requests for court appearances, Mr. Lagowski said.
Mr. Wu faced contempt of court charges, and a possible jail sentence for failing to comply with an order to surrender his United States passport as well as foreign travel documents. Mr. Lagowski said there had been no response so far to the warrant. Mr. Wu, who is from Taiwan, could have fled the country, leaving the warrant enforcement up to Taiwanese authorities.
In March, Mr. Wu wrote, in response to a motion seeking sanctions against him, that he was bankrupt and could not afford a lawyer. He also denied the Gore company’s allegations, filed initially in a lawsuit after he left the company in 2004, that he had “engaged in an extensive and fraudulent campaign to misappropriate Gore trade secrets and steal Gore property, data and files.â€
Two years later, Gore won a court order barring Mr. Wu from working in the polymer field until early 2016. Then in 2012, Gore filed a new lawsuit alleging that Mr. Wu was violating the order, working under the name of “Samuel Wu,†and had set up companies in Taiwan and China to research and develop polymer clothing that would compete with Gore products.
According to Gore, Mr. Wu was marketing his products on the Internet, and boasted to Chinese television that he was earning nearly $100 million annually from his efforts.
While the chancery court seldom attracts the spotlight, it recently drew attention when it failed to win a United States Supreme Court review of a ruling that barred it from allowing judges to decide arbitration cases in private. Delaware began the program in 2009 to compete with private arbitration forums. Two years ago, a group claiming that the program was unconstitutional won a ruling ending the closed-door forum. And its effort to have the Supreme Court reopen the secret proceedings was denied last month.
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