(Bloomberg) -- A former Tesla Inc. software engineer was ordered to appear before a judge to face allegations that three days into his job, he started stealing confidential files and transferring them to a personal storage account.During his two-week employment ending Jan. 6, Alex Khatilov stole more than 6,000 scripts, or files of code, that automate a broad range of business functions, Tesla argues in its trade-secret theft complaint.Tesla convinced U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that the threat posed is serious enough that she granted a restraining order Friday requiring Khatilov to immediately preserve and return all files, records and emails to the company and appear before her, remotely, on Feb. 4.

Elon Musk’s electric-car maker has aggressively pursued lawsuits against other former employees and rival companies that it has accused of poaching engineers and stealing proprietary data.A software automation engineer, Khatilov was hired as one of a “select few Tesla employees” to have access to the files, which the company says were unrelated to his job. Tesla says it was forced to file the lawsuit because Khatilov lied about his theft and tried to delete evidence of it.

Tesla to Apple: Help Us Nail Robocar-Secrets Thief at China FirmKhatilov told Tesla security that he had only transferred a couple personal administrative documents, according to a court filing. After investigators found thousands of confidential files, the engineer said he forgot about them and tried to destroy them at the start of the interview, Tesla says, adding that it doesn’t know if he previously copied or sent the files to other locations.“The scripts are extremely valuable to Tesla, and they would be to a competitor,” according to the filing. “Access to these scripts would enable engineers at other companies to reverse engineer Tesla’s processes to create a similar system in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the expense.”

Khatilov couldn’t immediately be reached for comment and court records don’t indicate that he has a lawyer.

The New York Post reported on the case earlier. The newspaper quoted Khatilov denying allegations of wrongdoing and explaining that he downloaded the data by mistake and deleted the files from Dropbox at Tesla’s request.The case is Tesla v. Khatilov, 21-cv-00528, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose).

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