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Sergey Aleynikov Seeks Dismissal Of Case
Bloomberg reporting that Sergey Aleynikov wants a dismissal of his criminal case. Whether or not Goldman, which woke the FBI at 3 am to get on the case stat, will agree with his view is a different view.
At a hearing in Manhattan federal court on Aug. 10, defense attorney Sabrina Shroff said she will seek to persuade prosecutors to enter into a rare “deferred prosecution”
agreement. Under such agreements, prosecutors usually agree to dismiss criminal charges provided a defendant doesn’t break the law for a specified period of time.
“I’m seeking a deferred prosecution in this matter,”
Shroff, who declined to comment today, said in court on Aug. 10, according to a transcript of the hearing. “I’m looking to show the United States Attorney’s Office that my client never engaged in any improper behavior, was a well-respected employee, was not fired, was not reprimanded, nor were there any complaints issued against him.”
As a reminder, Sergey was arrested on July 3 and charged with "theft of trade secrets and transportation of stolen property in foreign commerce" and that the proprietary code, worth millions of dollars, lets the firm do “sophisticated, high-speed and high-volume trades on various stock and commodities markets,” prosecutors have said in court documents.
The Aug. 10 hearing was called for a judge to weigh a request by Shroff that Goldman be forced to turn over Aleynikov’s personnel file. U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty in Manhattan granted the request after Shroff said she couldn’t seek a deferred prosecution deal until she reviewed his Goldman file. Goldman Sachs had refused to surrender the records.
What is deferred prosecution?
It is common for lawyers to seek deferred prosecution deals with prosecutors, who rarely grant them. Among the beneficiaries of such agreements were former Credit Suisse Group banker Frank Quattrone, who was accused of obstructing justice, and the accounting firm KPMG LLP, which was accused of conspiring to sell illegal tax shelters.
At this point the smart money is on this case getting promptly swept under the rug, especially as Goldman has recently went on an aggressive reputation cleansing crusade, and the Aleynikov case is likely merely a case of remote file back up. If the prosecution had evidence that the Russian had actually distributed or sold the code, it would have been made widely available by now. The subsequent question is will a dismissal restore all pre-existing rights to Teza, will Misha Malyshev be allowed to recover the $100 million owed to him by Citadel, and will the new outfit attempt to recreate the HFT platform that was the only profitable group in Citadel in the disastrous 2008.
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C'mon, this one's in the bag: the money bag, that is, and a one-way ticket to somewhere tropical. Think rum-drinks and lines snorted off tight little tum-tums.
yeah this is going away. GS stepped in it when they said it could manipulate markets if code fell into wrong hands... woops.
GS never made that claim. It was an over-zealous DA who said that, trying to convince the judge that he shouldn't be given bail (an argument that the DA's office lost).
The DA based this statement on what GS told the FBI agent. Its so written in the complaint point 4(d)
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17118166/Complaint-Aleynikov
I have read it and just now re-read it.
Which part of 4D do you think implies or states maniuplation of the market? It only talks about the damages to GS caused by others eating part of their lunch through competition.
Agreed, I wasn't complete with sources. The word "manipulation" is indeed not used in the complaint.
However, in conjunction with other information, especially the protcol from the hearing:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17191934/USAvSergeyAleynikov-7409-Full
On p. 8 at lines 4 to 7:
This is clear to me. It was GS who raised the spectre of market manipulation it was not an invention of the FBI or the prosecutor.
As Yul Brynner said in the movie "Moses", "so it is written so it will be done",or in this case, so it is written so it can be done
I was not making a claim about the truth behind this claim, I was only saying it was GS who made that claim, not anyone else.
But my guess is that the FBI and prosecutors would simply not have been interested or involved here, if GS had not been able to make a strong case. They may have overstated just to get a criminal case going, or they may have been saying the truth. In both cases, questions about the ulteriour motives of GS remain.
Wonder how much Sergey shook GS down for?
i dunno
Goldman and Bank of Amerika run the markets along with Geithner, and beagle boy
Ben. There is no free markets, only welfare capitalism and socialism for
capitalism..
good articles;
href="http://www.iamned.com" target="_blank">good articles 4 slow news day
..http://www..
hat tip:
target="_blank">finance news & finance opinions
this has memoir from prison implications. looking for goldman to say "really that was old code, my bad"
What you see is not what you got.
I'm in the same camp, those that can obtain (more) credit don't want it.
Goldman and Bank of Amerika run the markets along with Geithner, and beagle boy
Ben. There is no free markets, only welfare capitalism and socialism for
capitalism..
good articles;
href="http://www.iamned.com" target="_blank">good articles 4 slow news day
..http://www..
hat tip:
target="_blank">finance news & finance opinions
> the Aleynikov case is likely merely a case of remote file back up
You don't get to do a remote file backup of files that you don't own.
Whether GS continues to pursue the matter and whether or not Aleynikov broke the law or 2 different matters.
If (and it is still an if unless proven otherwise) Aleynikov copied GS source code to a server not operated by GS... then he was far from an innocent programmer looking to backup code.
I understand the angst (however misplaced some of it may sometimes be) against GS, but this guy is no Robbin Hood, and I can't understand anyone being supportive of his activities given the current narrative.
Well, the code used in production and the code in development are frequently not the same. So while he assumingly was not authorized to do backups of the production code, he may have been in charge of back-upping his own development code.
When you are working for GS - or for that matter pretty much any company of any size writing software, the code does not belong to you. There is no such thing as backing up your own code to an offsite machine.
If you want to backup your code branches with a .tar.gz file and leave it on the corporate server in your home directory - no problem. Taking that tar ball and bringing it offsite days before you give notice is clearly something very different (again, if the assertions against him are accurate).
> There is no such thing as backing up your own code to an offsite machine.
Oh yeah, there is. If the code is part of an open source project to begin with, you're not only obliged but it's part of the Open Source License to contribute with the bug fixes and newer version of the code to the original project.
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php
"you may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program"
Why are you wasting bits?
GS trading software is about as far away from open source as you can get.
If you don't see the difference and why there is a legal canyon between the 2 examples, you are being quite dense.
You are assuming that just because a large corporation is involved here, you would find professionally managed projects that have everything in place and figured out.
However, even in large corporations you will find projects that are not managed well and leave it up to the participants to get organized in a sometimes makeshift, make-it-up-as-you-go-along way.
Thus I would not be surprised if GS programmers had to do their own personal code management. I would also not be surprised that there is no proper multi-user version control or code management or that tapes, CDs or DVDs with the code on it would be laying around openly in the offices.
> Thus I would not be surprised if GS programmers had to do their own personal code management.
You are talking about a company that spends literally billions annually on IT. Get real. They probably have a budget for just corporate backups that is in the 8 digit figures.
This guy was not making backups offsite 4 days before he gave notice because he worked for an ad-hoc development group and wanted to be a good citizen and make sure that there was a disaster recovery plan in place for the next 3 days of his employment.
OK. But that is not the claim Sergey is making here. *In addition* to his work at Golman Sach, Sergey also contributes to several open source projects for Erlan and some CPAN modules. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov). Probably he made some improvements to these open source libraries when he was using them at work. Any such improvements would have to be open source as part of the GPL and it would not be unreasonable to keep a copy of any of this *open source* work. His claim is that he was only trying to back up these open source contributions and anything else was "accidental". It was still stupid of him to not get formal approval if he wanted to make an open source contribution, and I don't really believe that you would "accidentally" copy any proprietary files, but copying files offsite is not automatically illegal here. It really depends what was copied.
Here is an article in our local fish wrap;
This is where a lot of your municipal tax money from the fat years is sitting. They illegally overtaxed you back then through government scams and are just sitting on billions of it. Tax surpluses is stealing from tax payers. Time to get that money back and force them to lower taxes.
Lee County boasts strength in reserves
http://www.news-press.com/article/20090817/NEWS01/908170347/1075
Educate yourself on how they pull this scam off.
http://cafr1.com/
Here is an article in our local fish wrap;
This is where a lot of your municipal tax money from the fat years is sitting. They illegally overtaxed you back then through government scams and are just sitting on billions of it. Tax surpluses is stealing from tax payers. Time to get that money back and force them to lower taxes.
Lee County boasts strength in reserves
http://www.news-press.com/article/20090817/NEWS01/908170347/1075
Educate yourself on how they pull this scam off.
http://cafr1.com/
> the Russian
He's been a US citizen for a good number of years. TD, you're being tedious, where there is no actual reason or need to be. Your choice, I guess.
I think Sergy should be prosecuted AFTER the whole board of Goldman Sach's.
Let he who has not browen the law throw the first indictment?
I recall in a previous discussion on tis topic that I recommended the best course of action for GS was to get the criminal case dismissed. Then if the parties wanted they could pursue the case as a civil matter and resolve it in the usual manner.
Best for both of 'em.
When people have these cards and refuse to spend, spend, spend then its only fair that someone else is doing the spending for them! Goldman and Bank of Amerika run the markets along with Geithner, and beagle boy Ben. There is no free markets, only welfare capitalism and socialism for capitalism..
good articles; good articles 4 slow news day ..http://www..
hat tip: finance news & finance opinions
Thanks for staying on this TD.
If Ms. Shroff had a case (and was an idealistic defense attorney who wasn't worried about her Manhattan future), she would file for dismissal based on the lack of prosecutorial merit(s), sans any "deferred prosecution" pre-announcement plea bargaining. Welcome to Amerika Sergey.
Reminds of the good old days when I worked for a living. I would stomp a gigantic financial mudhole into the chest of some middle aged white businessman. His lawyer would claim doubt to liability for a year but, my case was tight. Just before I would finally give in, the lawyer would go for doubt to collectability. That automatically meant that they agreed I was right.
Goldman to Sergey: My Bad.
You can put a fork in this one. Case dismissed. The "deferred prosecution" is to throw a bone to the dumb ass prosecutor, after all the arrest did ruin his Fourth of July weekend. No way Goldman wants to be on the receiving end of a bunch of subpoenas to answer questions about source code and algos.