Mobile phone company O2 yesterday secured an interim injunction in the High Court restraining a former manager from taking up a job offer with rival Meteor.

Alison Thompson has been employed at O2 for the last six years and has been an international product/voice manager for the last two years.

Yesterday Mr Justice Thomas Smyth granted an interim injunction until next Tuesday to O2 restraining Ms Thompson from taking up a new job with Meteor.

Counsel for O2, Roddy Horan SC, said Ms Thompson had been on "gardening leave" with the company and now wanted to take up a position with rival mobile company Meteor.

Ms Thompson is due to take up a position with Meteor as head of market planning, reporting to the marketing director. She handed in a month's notice to O2 at the end of March, but O2 has contended she must wait six months before working for a competitor.

O2 has claimed that in the light of the highly confidential and commercially sensitive areas of its business in which Ms Thompson was directly employed , O2 is at risk of losing significant commercial advantage over a main competitor in the mobile telephone services marketplace.

Meteor, it claimed, would get an unfair advantage from Ms Thompson's knowledge of imminent marketing plans and campaigns.

In an affidavit opened to the court, O2 human resource account manager Georgina Farrell said Ms Thompson's role in the company had given her exposure to the marketing plan for 2006 and the monthly financial forecasts up to June 2007.

Ms Thompson, it was claimed, also had access to technology reports containing information on the network during the course of her work.

The nature of Ms Thompson's functions were such as to give her information, strategies, forecasts and plans that would be extremely valuable to O2's competitors, particularly Meteor.

The information to which Ms Thompson had access, Ms Farrell said in her affidavit, would be of particular relevance to initiatives to be launched as part of upcoming Christmas campaigns. Ms Thompson, she said, also had exposure to O2 marketing strategy and plans regarding new business customers.

It was claimed that Ms Thompson was also privy in her job to financial information, including voicemail usage statistics, number of users and base size by usage segment.