Last Friday, a team of FBI officials arrested Sergey Aleynikov, a 39-year-old former vice-president of Goldman Sachs, at Newark Airport. According to the complaint, Aleynikov had uploaded proprietary information — including the secret code to unlocking Goldman’s automated stocks and commodities trading businesses — to an unnamed file-hosting service in Europe just before he resigned from his $400,000-a-year job at Goldman back at the beginning of June. Whether this is a case of international industrial espionage or merely an oopsie, here’s the question: Aleynikov, who is being held pending $750, 000 bail, told FBI officials that he had only intended to download “open source” files from the server, and only later realized that he had downloaded “more than he had intended.” His wife, for her part, is annoyed that the Fed ruined Fourth of July:
His wife, Elina, says her husband is innocent. Speaking in a phone interview from the couple’s New Jersey home, she says her husband worked hard for Goldman Sachs and has been a good citizen — noting he’s lived in the US for 19 years. She seems mystified that federal authorities would arrest him on the eve of a holiday.
Either way, it seems clear that Aleynikov is not nearly so graceful behind the computer as he is on the dance floor. A video of him and Elina dancing to “You Light Up My Life” in a ballroom-dance competition indicates that, should he get himself out of this sticky wicket, he may yet have a future on Dancing With the Stars.
Either way, it seems clear that Aleynikov is not nearly so graceful behind the computer as he is on the dance floor. A video of him and Elina dancing to “You Light Up My Life” in a ballroom-dance competition indicates that, should he get himself out of this sticky wicket, he may yet have a future on Dancing With the Stars.
A Goldman trading scandal? [Reuters]
Bail set at $750,000 for ex-Goldman programmer [Reuters]
