Goldman Sachs programmer gets eight years for trading code theft

A former Goldman Sachs computer programmer has been sentenced to eight years and one month in prison for stealing code used by the bank in its high-frequency trading systems.

Sergey Aleynikov was found guilty of theft of trade secrets and interstate transportation of stolen property in a Manhattan federal court. In addition to his prison sentence he was fined £12,500 and will serve three years supervised release.

"Protecting the proprietary information of America's companies is critically important," said Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara.

"Today's sentence sends a clear message that professionals like Sergey Aleynikov who abuse their positions of trust to steal confidential business information from their employers will be prosecuted and punished."

Aleynikov worked at Goldman Sachs from 2007 until 2009 developing high-frequency stock trading systems which conduct huge stock trades in milliseconds, allowing large arbitrage profits which the FBI said amounted to millions of dollars a year.

In 2009 he accepted a job with rival firm Teza Technologies and on his last day sent an encrypted portion of the Goldman Sachs code to a German server.

He was arrested after flying home from a meeting with Teza and was found to have the code on his laptop and a separate removable drive.

"[Aleynikov's] conduct deserves a significant sentence because the scope of his theft was audacious - motivated solely by greed, and characterised by supreme disloyalty to his employer," said District Judge Denise Cote.

Good high-frequency trading code is much sought after in the commercial banking sector.

When run on the big iron systems for which it is designed, the software can take advantage of momentary differences in the prices of shares on world exchanges and buy and sell huge volumes of shares - turning the slight difference in prices into large profits.

Last month Samarth Agrawal, a former Société Générale trader, was sentenced to three years in prison for stealing the French investment bank's high-frequency trading software to take to a rival firm.