The former Goldman Sachs computer programmer convicted of stealing trade secrets from the Wall Street bank said it was wrong to make a federal case out of his taking the code for his former employer’s high-frequency trading system.
“As a threshold matter, stealing a trade secret related to Goldman Sachs’s high-frequency trading system does not violate the Economic Espionage Act and transporting such a stolen trade secret from one state to another does not violate the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property Act,” the programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, said in court papers filed late Thursday in Manhattan federal court.
In the papers, Aleynikov is requesting a judgment of acquittal or a new trial.
The 40-year-old was arrested in 2009 after he took the programming code on his way out the door from his $400,000 a year job. Goldman, after it discovered the theft, notified the FBI, which then arrested Aleynikov.
The prosecution of the Russian immigrant is part of a crackdown by US Attorney Preet Bharara on white collar crime. But the two-week trial before Judge Denise Cote also fueled some pushback on why this case, in particular, was pursued by the FBI.
Aleynikov claimed no proprietary code was taken, just off-the-shelf code that was available to his new employer.
No “rational juror” could have found Aleynikov guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crimes charged in the indictment based upon the entirety of the record,” his lawyers said in the 64-page filing.