Sergei Aleynikov, a Russian-born programmer convicted of stealing computer codes from the U.S. financial firm Goldman Sachs, was freed from prison on Friday after a U.S. appeals court overturned the conviction.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the trial court to enter a judgment of acquittal shortly after Aleynikov’s lawyer made an oral appeal before a three-judge panel, insisting that his client had no intention to sell trade secrets.
The court said it would issue a written statement "in due course" to explain its ruling.
Aleynikov, a 42-year-old Russian immigrant with dual U.S. and Russian citizenship, was employed by Goldman Sachs between 2007- 2009 to develop and maintain computer platforms for high-frequency trading.
The programmer was arrested shortly after he left his $400,000-a-year job with the famous investment firm to take a job in Teza Technologies, a start-up high-frequency trading company in Chicago, for an offer of $300,000 in salary, $700,000 in bonus money and a profit-sharing cut.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Aleynikov secretly copied Goldman Sachs's confidential source code in his last days at the bank and intended to use it to build a similar trading platform for his new employer. The trading platform, which Goldman bought for $500 million in 1999, generated hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.
Aleynikov was convicted by a jury in December 2010. In March 2011, a U.S. District Court in Manhattan sentenced Aleynikov to eight years and one month in prison for theft of trade secrets and transportation of stolen property.
He spent almost a year of his sentence at a federal prison in Fort Dix, N.J.
The New York Times commented on Friday that “the reversal deals a major blow to the Justice Department, which has made the prosecution of high-tech crime and intellectual property theft a top priority.”
