By Marcus Williams.
Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, is facing 15 years in prison after a New York jury found him guilty of stealing propriety code connected to the bank's high-frequency trading platform.
Aleynikov was found guilty of two counts of stealing the firm’s trade secrets by appropriating part of a high-frequency computer source code. He could serve as much as 10 years in prison on the spying charge and five years for the interstate transportation charge.
US District Court judge Denise Cote set sentencing of Aleynikov for March 18.
Aleynikov, a naturalised US citizen who emigrated from Russia in 1991, allegedly unlawfully copied, duplicated, downloaded and transferred computer codes from Goldman Sachs and uploaded the codes to a computer server in Germany.
The case has caused a firestorm on Wall Street in the US by throwing a spotlight on the highly prized trading systems created by Goldman to gain an edge on rivals in the financial markets.
Assistant Manhattan US Attorney Rebecca Rohr told jurors that Aleynikov was a “thief” in her closing statement. On his last day of work at Goldman in June 2009, she claimed Aleynikov uploaded hundreds of thousands of lines of source code from the bank's trading system. Aleynikov later took the code with him to a meeting with his new employers n July 2009, she said.
Aleynikov's lawyer insisted Goldman Sachs “wasn’t the New York Yankees of high-frequency trading”, telling jurors that prosecutors exaggerated the value of the firm’s high-frequency trading platform.
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