A former Goldman Sachs programmer was sentenced on Friday to more than eight years in prison for stealing secret computer code that enables high-speed trading.
Sergey Aleynikov, 41, of New Jersey, was sentenced by US District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan after his December conviction for theft of trade secrets and transportation of stolen property in interstate and foreign commerce.
Cote said she avoided leniency in her sentence of eight years and one month in part because Aleynikov never fully admitted his guilt or accepted responsibility. He also was fined US$12,500.
She said she also wanted to send a stern message to people who think it is not a serious crime to steal intellectual property, a crime that costs companies billions of dollars annually and led Congress to pass the Economic Espionage Act to toughen penalties for those who steal.
Prosecutors said Aleynikov left his US$400,000-a-year job as a vice president at New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc in 2008 and took trade secrets with him to help his new company, Teza Technologies, gain an advantage with high-speed trading. There, he was to be paid US$300,000 annually, with a US$700,000 bonus his first year and a revenue-sharing plan afterward.
Before he was sentenced, Aleynikov said he very much regretted “the foolish decision to download information before I left Goldman Sachs,” though he added that only some of the information he took was proprietary to the company.
Aleynikov, a naturalized US citizen who went to the US from Russia in 1990, said he “never meant to cause Goldman any harm and I haven’t acted with malice to anyone at the bank.”
His lawyer, Kevin Marino, called what Aleynikov did a “foolish, horrible, tragic, ridiculous mistake.”
However, the judge said it was no mistake.
“It was motivated solely by greed,” she said.
Meanwhile, a former Goldman Sachs Group director accused of leaking confidential boardroom information has sued US regulators, saying they are trying to unfairly deprive him of a jury trial.
Rajat Gupta is fighting civil charges that he tipped Galleon hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, the central figure in a sprawling insider trading case, about Warren Buffett’s plans to invest in Goldman Sachs at the height of the financial crisis.
Gupta said in his complaint on Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission is trying to retroactively apply the Dodd-Frank financial reform law by filing a so-called administrative proceeding against him. The proceeding means he must defend himself in a court that is part of the SEC rather than in a federal court, where he could have a jury trial.
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