The lawyer for Sergei Aleynikov, a Russian-born programmer convicted of stealing computer codes from the U.S. financial firm Goldman Sachs, has requested his client be released pending another appeal, after an initial appeal was turned down.
Aleynikov, a 40-year-old Russian immigrant, 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 investment firm to take a job in Teza Technologies, a start-up high-frequency trading company in Chicago.
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 last year. He was also fined $12,500. On March 19, 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. The U.S. District Judge, after sentencing Aleynikov, rejected a request by his lawyer, Kevin Marino, to free Aleynikov during an appeal.
"I very much regret the foolish decision to download information, part of this information was proprietary to Goldman," Aleynikov said before his sentencing. "I never meant to cause Goldman any harm. I did not intend to harm anyone," the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying.
MOSCOW, April 6 (RIA Novosti)
