Samarth Agrawal was last week arrested in New York and charged with theft of high-value trade secrets for stealing the proprietary computer code used in the high frequency trading system of his former employer.
Following his arrest by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Agrawal, 26, was charged by Preet Bharara, United States district attorney for the Southern District of New York, with one count of theft of trade secrets.
According to the charges, Agrawal planned to set up a company after returning to India. If convicted, Agrawal, who was presented to the Manhattan Federal Court, faces a maximum of 10 years of prison term.
The DA's office detailed how Agrawal, who worked at the Societe Generale office in New York first as a quantitative analyst and then as a trader in the company's HF trading group that has spent over the years millions of dollars developing a computer system and associated computer code that allowed it to engage in high sophisticated high-speed trading on securities markets.
The company, the prosecution said, had taken steps to protect the confidentiality of the code. In April 2009, after Agrawal was promoted to the position of trader within the company's high-frequency trading group, he obtained access to a unit of the code relating to the type of the trading activity with which he was involved.
He also got access to another unit of the code although he was not involved with the second one and did not have permission to review.
The prosecution alleged that Agrawal printed out the hundreds of pages of the first code from his office in June. He was unaware that he was being captured by surveillance cameras.
Two months later he was also captured on camera printing out multiple portions of the second code. He did the same thing on the last day at office November 12, 2009, when he took four days' sick leave. November 17, 2009, he resigned.
The prosecutors said that when his supervisors tried to persuade him not to resign and even offered to give him 'many multiples' of his $130,000 bonus that he got the previous year, Agrawal declined, saying that he wanted to go back to India and set up his own trading firm.
Agrawal, who was later contacted by an undercover FBI agent posing as a recruiter, told the latter that he was in touch with most of the big names among New York's financial firms.
