A Canadian computer company may be sued for millions following the theft last month of a hard drive containing information on hundreds of thousands of people.

The disk belonged to ISM Canada, a data management company and wholly owned subsidiary of IBM Canada. One of the company's employees has since been charged with possession of stolen property and is due to appear in court on 27 February.

Stored on the 30GB drive were tax records for 43,000 businesses and details of about 650,000 clients of Investors Group, Canada's biggest mutual fund firm.

According to Canadian Press reports, local police said that forensic examiners were looking at the now reclaimed drive to confirm whether any of the information had been accessed.

But the finding of the hard drive does not mean the end of the nightmare for ISM, which now faces a class action lawsuit worth millions of dollars on behalf of the people whose confidential information the disk contained.

The lawsuit seeks damages from ISM as well as the Saskatchewan government and a number of companies who also had client data on the drive.

The firms and local government agencies hit may themselves take action to recover the cost of contacting their customers to inform them of the theft.

Local Saskatchewan government officals said they were happy that the hard drive had been found and that the information was apparently untouched.