I have been conned

[Nofal]

Hi,

I need a legal advise on the following case:
I sold a 5 year development software for a £1, in return the company will offer me a "software development manager/architecture" job to be responsible to deploy the softwrare live, and that exactly what I did. Always, my understanding that incase of a redundancy or the software did not successed, I will have the right to buy it back for a £1.
The software went live 5 months after I started and is used by 5 major customers.

Two years later, they decided that I have been paid too much of £47K and they want to drop my salary by £10K. To that, they are making my post redundant, I was told that I am not entitled to buy the software because I signed the contract which has a small paragraph saying that this option is only open in the first 12 months, I was not aware of this.
The sofwtare gave the company a 5 years head start, also the software played a major component in securing a grant worth £400,000 from WDA (Welsh Development Agency).
The company by no means poor, they have plenty money in the bank and not in debit.
Can anybody help in this case, or I just have to accept the fact that I lost the rights to my software, and they are only the ones who are going to benfit fro it.
Is it illegal to publish this case on the internet and name and shame the company publicly for taking advanatge of my full trust and robbing me ?
Please write to me or send an email to: eliasn@kyokushin.co.uk
Looking forware to hearing from you.
Nofal Elias

 

[Michael Wechsler]

Hi,

I need a legal advise on the following case:
I sold a 5 year development software for a £1, in return the company will offer me a "software development manager/architecture" job to be responsible to deploy the softwrare live, and that exactly what I did. Always, my understanding that incase of a redundancy or the software did not successed, I will have the right to buy it back for a £1.
The software went live 5 months after I started and is used by 5 major customers.

Two years later, they decided that I have been paid too much of £47K and they want to drop my salary by £10K. To that, they are making my post redundant, I was told that I am not entitled to buy the software because I signed the contract which has a small paragraph saying that this option is only open in the first 12 months, I was not aware of this.
The sofwtare gave the company a 5 years head start, also the software played a major component in securing a grant worth £400,000 from WDA (Welsh Development Agency).
The company by no means poor, they have plenty money in the bank and not in debit.
Can anybody help in this case, or I just have to accept the fact that I lost the rights to my software, and they are only the ones who are going to benfit fro it.
Is it illegal to publish this case on the internet and name and shame the company publicly for taking advanatge of my full trust and robbing me ?
Looking forware to hearing from you.

I'm very sorry to hear about your problem. This issue is probably one of the most frequent that I encounter in dealing with buyouts of small companies. Did you have an attorney during the negotiation of this deal?

I can't say anything for sure since so a great deal of the results of analysis is contingent upon that which is contained in the writing you have. This company might be right and I wouldn't doubt that this company might know what they are doing and possibly have done this before to other small developers. You need to have this agreement reviewed by a competent attorney to be able to properly evaluate.

Your deal is supposedly recorded adequately within the contract you signed. A good attorney should have warned you that unless the contract contains protection for your employment, you might be considered some type of "at will" employee. In the US, at least, there is no obligation generally for a company to keep you on staff and you can be fired at any time. If you don't like your pay, they can decrease it or release you. Is there anything in your agremeent that speaks to this? Typically there will be some type of "cause" clause where you cannot be terminated without "reasonable cause" which is defined in the agreement. There may also be a parachute clause, where if you are terminated prior to X number of years, you will be paid a sum of no less than X dollars/pounds.

Is it wrong for you to post information about what happened? To begin, you should make sure your agreement doesn't have a "disparagement clause" that will cause you to lose additional right in doing so. Second, make sure you don't have any other rights because if you make such derogatory statements, it will also potentially devalue the asset you hope to retreive.

In the US at least, the truth is a defense to any defamation claim because, by definition, if something is true it is not false or legally defamatory. It might cast someone in a negative light. There may be laws concerning this but I'm generally not inclined to believe that you can't report the truth as any other news reporter could without problem. Do note that this may also make you look bad too.

This isn't an easy issue and I feel very badly for you. The first step is though to take the agreement to an attorney.