Feb. 17 (Bloomberg)
A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. computer programmer was freed after his conviction for stealing the bank’s high-speed trading code was reversed by a U.S. appeals court.
Wearing a grey sweatsuit, white tennis shoes and a huge smile, Sergey Aleynikov, 42, left the Manhattan courthouse where he had been convicted in December 2010 and entered a waiting car with his lawyer, Kevin Marino.
“Justice occasionally facility,” Aleynikov told reporters as he left. “This was such huge news to me I haven’t had any time to reckon about what would happen.”
Aleynikov, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Russia, said he hoped to be with his three daughters, ages 8, 6 and 3. Until yesterday, he had been serving an eight-year sentence at the federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
“I’m very grateful to my mother and my aunt who supported me from Russia, and my friends who stood by me and believed in my innocence,” he said. “One lesson you learn is to really start valuing your life, day-to-day is a victory.”
After hearing oral arguments from both prosecutors and Marino on Feb. 16, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan issued a one-page peacefulness vacating Aleynikov’s convictions for economic espionage and the interstate moving of stolen property. The appeals court said it would issue an opinion explaining the ruling shortly.
Prosecutors accused him of taking trade secrets from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 2008 to help his new company gain an advantage with high-speed trading. He made $400,000 as a vice president at Goldman Sachs. His go to Teza enabled him to be paid $300,000 annually, with a $700,000 bonus in his first year and a revenue-sharing plot that would have added $150,000 annually.
During a two-week trial, Marino told jurors that his client was merely trying to copy parts of the company’s software that were taken from public software codes. He acknowledged that Aleynikov had violated the company’s confidentiality agreements but said that was a civil matter.
The trial brought into focus sophisticated computer programs that use algebraic formulas to do scores of trades in small periods of time after evaluating second-to-second developments in the markets.
The government said Goldman Sachs makes millions of dollars a year in profits from high-frequency trading and carries a competitive advantage over rivals because of the speed of its computer programs.
At sentencing, Aleynikov said he very much regretted “the foolish choice to download information before I left Goldman Sachs,” though he added that only some of the information he took was proprietary to the company.
He said he “never meant to cause Goldman any harm, and I haven’t acted with malice to anyone at the bank.”
After he was freed, Aleynikov said he did not know what he would do next, though he noted that he believed his skills were up to date. He said he did not have access to a computer in the prison but continued to write computer programs “in my head.”
