Sergey Aleynikov, the ballroom-dancing former Goldman Sachs vice-president who was arrested last summer for stealing proprietary source code from Goldman Sachs’s high-frequency trading platform has been convicted. The 40-year-old Russian immigrant with dual citizenship faces up to ten years in prison. The judge placed him under home confinement and electronic monitoring until he’s sentenced on March 18. Goldman’s charge was that Aleynikov, who uploaded the code just before resigning from his $400,000-a-year job, intended to hand it over to his new employer, Teza Technologies, a start-up high-frequency trading firm. In fact, it was Aleynikov’s indictment that helped push high-frequency trading and flash trades and their potential abuses into the headlines. The computerized system, which can transmit millions of orders at lightning speed was offered as an explanation why Goldman and other large banks and hedge funds were posting profits so soon after the financial system collapsed.
Here is the thing, though. It’s nice and all as DealBook points out, that the U.S. attorneys office has “raised its profile in its aggressive pursuit of corporate crime” and that the Justice Department has made “the prosecution of high-tech crime a priority.” And maybe we’ve been reading too much Zero Hedge. But we just thought the first conviction over the “doomsday machine” wouldn’t be with Goldman Sachs as the victim.
Ex-Goldman Programmer Is Convicted [DealBook/NYT]
