A former SocGen trader accused of stealing the bank's trading code for use in his new hedge fund job has been found guilty in a trial in Manhattan.
Samarth Agrawal, who had protested his innocence until the latter stages of the trial, finally admitted the wrongdoing during testimony on Wednesday.
Agrawal was arrested by the FBI in April as he was about to start a new job with rival HFT shop Tower Research Capital. He was accused of copying reams of proprietary code into Microsoft Word documents and printing off hundreds of pages of data and source code.
Agrawal will be sentenced on 24 February, when he can expect a reduced sentence of between four and five years - as opposed to the ten-year maximum - following his admission of guilt.
The Manhattan court house will now prepare for the trial later this month of former Goldman programmer Sergey Aleynikov on charges that he stole code in 2009 to take to his new employer, Teza Technologies, a high-frequency trading start-up in Chicago.