Jeff Gundlach asked for downloads of TCW [see profile] data and called his bosses "totally frickin' worthless" months before they fired him in December 2009, according to ex-TCW managing director Cris Santa Ana. That's the latest testimony in the ongoing courtroom struggle between Gundlach and TCW [see transcript].

To read the rest of the story of the fight between Gundlach and TCW, click here.

Bloomberg and Reuters reported on Santa Ana's testimony yesterday.

Santa Ana, now chief risk officer for Gundlach's DoubleLine Capital [see profile], told jurors that he and the rest of DoubleLine's team "needed to be prepared" because they were afraid TCW was going to fire them. Yet Gundlach and his colleagues insist that they did not use any proprietary TCW data to start DoubleLine. Santa Ana said that DoubleLine's and TCW's mortgage bond analyzing systems have a lot in common because they were built by some of the same people.

"They should be similar," Santa Ana said yesterday.

Also yesterday, Michael Reilly, equities chief investment officer at TCW, testified that Gundlach was acting "angrier, more vitriolic" in the months before TCW fired him as chief investment officer.

Gundlach and his team started DoubleLine in December 2009, weeks after TCW fired him. TCW filed suit in January 2010, accusing Gundlach and others of stealing trade secrets. Gundlach fired back, claiming that TCW dumped him to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fees to Gundlach's team. The trial for both TCW's claims and Gundlach's cross-claim started last week in Los Angeles, the hometown of both TCW and DoubleLine. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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