India’s largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel has filed a complaint with the police, accusing a former employee of copying internal documents and sharing them with rival newcomer Reliance Jio Infocomm.

Airtel claimed in the complaint that Yasir Majid, who left the company in April after more than 10 years, had copied confidential information, which he later provided to Jio when he joined at the end of April, the Economic Times reported today.

The police report, according to the Times, said “it become evident that Majid downloaded, copied and extracted confidential financial data for his own use and the use by his current employer Reliance Jio Infocomm”.

The report went on to say that Airtel’s information security team detected that Majid had transferred data from his company laptop to his personal email. The data included information on base station locations and future installations.

Majid has denied transferring data, and Jio said it was looking into the claim, the Times reported

Airtel has a 23 per cent market share, while new-entrant Jio, which obtained a pan-India 2.3GHz licence five years ago, announced recently it will commercially launch services in December, following an “extensive beta launch”.

Jio is running out of time since operators are required to roll out 4G service across 90 per cent of the cities and 50 per cent of rural areas within five years of receiving spectrum.

In April an executive said it would launch 4G service in five cities – New Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Nagpur – by June, but the company hasn’t confirmed the launch. It faces penalties if it fails to launch 4G services by the end of June.

The newcomer is expected to disrupt India’s fiercely competitive mobile market, which has 12 players, with its nationwide high-speed network, low tariffs and customer-focused apps to differentiate its 4G services from competitors’.

Jio Chat, which it launched in mid-April, has over a million active users, which the company said were acquired without any paid promotion or advertising.

It plans to release additional apps covering health, finance, e-commerce and TV.