Former Société Générale trader found guilty of HFT code theft

Samarth Agrawal on trial in Manhattan for theft of proprietary computer code from French bank

Former Société Générale trader Samarth Agrawal has been found guilty in a New York court for stealing proprietary computer code from the French bank. US district judge Jed Rakoff stated Agrawal had “admitted all the essential elements, certainly of the first count, if not the second”. He later admitted his guilt in the closing days of the trial.

The former trader is guilty of theft of trade secrets and transportation of stolen property in interstate commerce.

Agrawal was arrested in April after an FBI investigation and accused of copying the proprietary code that Société Générale used for high-frequency trading. The FBI said Agrawal copied large amounts of code into Microsoft Word documents and later printed them off, before being caught on surveillance cameras putting the hundreds of pages of code into a bag.

Agrawal will be sentenced in February.

Under the terms of his contract, the former trader was not allowed to be employed at a rival company until March, and was arrested shortly before he was due to start at Tower Research Capital, a Manhattan hedge fund.

The trail of former Goldman Sachs programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, was set to begin in the same court on November 29. Aleynikov is also accused of taking proprietary code for high-frequency trading before attempting to pass it on to his new employer, Teza Technologies.