Aleynikov, 40, entered his plea today before U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote in New York. The judge set a trial date of Nov. 29.
Aleynikov was arrested in July and indicted Feb. 11. A prosecutor said during a July court appearance that the alleged theft is the “most substantial” New York-based Goldman can recall. The programmer stole code on his last day at the bank in June, according to the indictment.
“The defendant has taken source code at various other times during the course of his employment,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Facciponti told Cote today.
Aleynikov’s lawyer, Sabrina P. Shroff, declined to comment after the hearing.
According to the indictment, Aleynikov’s last day at Goldman was June 5, before he left to join Teza Technologies LLC, a Chicago-based firm co-founded by Misha Malyshev, a former Citadel Investment Group LLC trader.
Beginning at 5:20 p.m., he transferred Goldman code for its trading platform to an outside server in Germany, according to the indictment.
Deleting History
“After transferring the files, Aleynikov deleted the program he used to encrypt the files and deleted the computer’s ‘bash history,’ which records the most recent commands executed on his computer,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.
Teza suspended Aleynikov after his arrest and has since fired him. On July 2, he attended meetings at Teza’s office and brought his laptop computer and another storage device, each of which held Goldman’s source code, the government said.
Facciponti told Cote today that a preliminary search of Teza’s computers didn’t turn up any Goldman source code.
“There’s a good reason why the U.S. attorney found no Goldman code on the Teza computers, and that’s because Teza got no Goldman code from Aleynikov or anyone else,” Chris C. Gair, a lawyer for Teza at Jenner & Block LLP in Chicago, said in a phone interview.
The software code at issue in the case, worth millions of dollars, lets Goldman do “sophisticated, high-speed and high- volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,” prosecutors said in court papers. Aleynikov planned to earn three times his salary by joining the new company and engaging in high-volume automated trading, prosecutors said at the time of his arrest.
$750,000 Bail
Aleynikov, who is free on $750,000 bail, lives in New Jersey and holds dual U.S. and Russian citizenship. He and Shroff, his lawyer, previously said the files prosecutors claim he stole weren’t shared with anyone and he took them so he could work from home.
The indictment followed Shroff’s appeals to prosecutors to drop the case.
Aleynikov starting working at Goldman in 2007, the government said. He was part of a team of workers responsible for improving the computer platform.
Before joining Goldman, Aleynikov worked for about eight years at IDT Corp., the U.S. vendor of prepaid calling cards, where he led the team responsible for developing routing systems, according to the profile on the social-networking site LinkedIn.
He is charged in the indictment with one count of theft of trade secrets, one count of transportation of stolen property in foreign commerce, and one count of unauthorized computer access. He faces as long as 25 years in prison if convicted.
The case is U.S. v. Aleynikov, 1:10-cr-00096, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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