Lufthansa Sues Amex Over Client Data Use

<H1>Lufthansa Sues Amex Over Client Data Use</H1><H3>By Paul Needham</H3><I>Frankfurt </I>- Lufthansa AirPlus, the corporate card division of German airline Lufthansa, is suing American Express for DM2.8 million in a case of client-data misuse.

Lufthansa claims John Kames, a former AirPlus sales manager, copied the AirPlus database of 22,000 clients before leaving to become Amex's travel services manager in January 1995. AirPlus said he then used the addresses for a major mailing last summer before the use of the AirPlus data was discovered. Amex later agreed to discontinue the campaign.

The events came at a time when Amex was trying to gain ground on AirPlus, which has some 200,000 cards circulating in Germany and is estimated to have a corporate air travel market share of 70 percent. "This was not a cavalier offense," AirPlus managing director Anton Lill said. "We have lost clients and lost business because of it, and if we did nothing we would have lost client confidence."

Lill, who said AirPlus has a corporate air travel budget of DM500 million with parent company Lufthansa, said the card company made several efforts to reach an out-of-court settlement with Amex and only launched proceedings as a final step after receiving no satisfactory reply. "Perhaps they did not believe we were serious," he said.

The DM2.8 million represents the "license value," or the price a third party would have had to pay for use of the data, Lill said.

American Express confirmed the events leading up to the lawsuit and said the company acted quickly once it learned of the situation. "When this was discovered, our contract with John Kames was canceled," said Frank Weber, spokesman for Amex in Germany. "Mr. Kames has not been employed by Amex since this was discovered."

Weber said he could not comment on the nature of the confidential discussions that have taken place between Lufthansa and Amex because Amex places a high priority on data confidentiality.