U.S. Charges Programmer in Theft of Goldman Code

He was a computer programmer earning $400,000 a year to develop a top secret trading program at one of the biggest and most venerable Wall Street firms.

But last month, in the final few days before he left the firm for an even more lucrative job in Chicago, the bank noticed the desktop computer at his office in New York was being used to transfer large amounts of data to a Web site in Germany.

Late last Friday, the programmer, named in court documents as Sergey Aleynikov, a naturalized American citizen who originally immigrated from Russia and who now lives in New Jersey, was arrested by U.S. agents as he got off a flight at Newark Airport, according to the criminal complaint filed in court in the Southern District of New York.

He was charged, according to the court documents, with copying computer code that allowed the bank to “engage in sophisticated high speed and high volume trades on various stock and commodities markets.”

The documents allege that Mr. Aleynikov passed in and out of the bank’s offices in New York using his personal swipe card and used his home computer to evade the bank’s security to steal software that was described as central to its trading strategy.

The arrest throws a spotlight on the high-tech rivalry between the world’s biggest banks in the lucrative world of financial markets, where institutions spend millions of dollars on the latest technology to gain a competitive edge.

But perhaps more startling than the theft itself was the victim of Mr. Aleynikov’s alleged crime: Goldman Sachs.

On Monday, the bank refused to comment publicly on the potentially embarrassing case. But a person familiar with Goldman Sachs said this was an instance in which someone had tried to steal proprietary information but that the company had since “secured its systems.” He insisted…