Under California law, civil “[c]onspiracy is not a cause of action, but a legal doctrine that imposes liability on persons who, although not actually committing a tort themselves, share with the immediate tortfeasors a common plan or design in its perpetration.” Applied Equip.

that these Defendants did owe continuing “statutory duties under Article [sic] 53.1 and 53.3 [of the Russian Civil Code] to act honestly and fairly with Rambler.” For the reasons stated above, however, Plaintiff fails to sufficiently allege that Sysoev and Smirnoff occupied positions giving rise to such statutory obligations.

3d 36, 57 (Ct. App. 2015) (rejecting plaintiff’s claim that “the discovery rule must prevent the statute of limitations from running until [they] had sufficient evidence to support their prima facie case” as “unsupported by any pertinent legal authority.”); see also Grisham v. Philip Morris U.S.A., Inc., 151 P.3d 1151, 1156 (Cal.

2005), “if a plaintiff’s reasonable and diligent investigation discloses” or would have disclosed, “only one kind of wrongdoing when the injury was actually caused by tortious conduct of a wholly different sort, the discovery rule postpones accrual of the statute of limitations on the newly discovered claim.” Id. at 924.

For similar reasons, I would hold that the fraud claim (count 13) survives as to Konovalov, Sysoev, and Smirnoff to the extent it is based on fraudulent activities related to the secret development of NGINX Plus code at Rambler and the subsequent concealment of that activity.1 Although these claims sound in fraud, and are thus subject to the heightened-pleading requirement of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b), see Vess v. Ciba-Geigy Corp. USA, 317 F.3d 1097, 1103 (9th Cir. 2003), the complaint’s detailed description of Konovalov, Sysoev, and Smirnoff’s clandestine development of NGINX Plus code using Rambler resources meets that rule’s standards.