March 24 (Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said she declined in 2008 to limit the recruitment or hiring of Google Inc. employees after being contacted by two senior officials at the search engine company.
Sandberg made the assertion in a court filing as Google, Apple Inc., Intel Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. prepare for a trial scheduled in May over claims they agreed not to recruit each other's employees in violation of antitrust law. Neither Sandberg nor Facebook are defendants in the case.
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The lawsuit in federal court in San Jose, California, mirrors claims that Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit Inc. and Walt Disney Co.'s animation studio Pixar and visual-effects specialist Lucasfilm Ltd. settled with the U.S. Justice Department in 2010. The plaintiffs include software and hardware engineers, programmers, animators, digital artists, Web developers and other technical professionals.
Sandberg worked at Mountain View, California-based Google from 2001 to 2008, where she became vice president of global online sales and operations, she said in the filing. Before working on a partnership with Intuit in 2006, Google had agreed not to recruit the employees involved. Fewer than 20 employees were on that list, Sandberg said in the May 17, 2013, statement, which was filed March 21.
The next year, according to the lawsuit, Google put Intuit employees on a "do not cold call" list — an agreement that Sandberg doesn't remember being involved with and which wasn't related to her prior work with Intuit, according to the filing. While at Facebook in 2008, Sandberg fielded separate calls from Google employees Jonathan Rosenberg, a former Google senior vice president, and Omid Kordestani, who were concerned about the rate at which Facebook was hiring Google employees.
'I Declined'
"I declined at the time to limit Facebook's recruitment or hiring of Google employees," she said in the filing. "Nor have I made or authorized any such agreement between Facebook and Google since that time."
Representatives of Google and Menlo Park, California-based Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the filing.
In October, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh ruled that more than 64,000 technical employees can proceed as a group against Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe with claims that their incomes were held down by the companies' agreements not to recruit one another's workers.
Intuit, Pixar and Lucasfilm have tentatively settled the antitrust claims.
The case is In re High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation, 11-cv-02509, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).
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