22 March 2011: Indian citizen, Samarth Agarwal, who has worked as a trader in Societe Generale, will have to undergo 3 years of imprisonment in US for stealing a proprietary computer code from SocGen’s office and selling the same to another trading group called Tower Capital Research. He was known to be a qualitative analyst earlier and then was promoted as a trader in company’s High Frequency Trading Group. The computer code was developed by SocGen, spending millions of dollars, to perform sophisticated and high-speed trading of various securities markets. This code is found to have generated millions of dollars profits to the company.
The convicted has agreed that he has stolen the code and wanted to develop the same trading system at Tower’s, for which he was supposed to be paid USD 575,000 and 20 percent of profits generated by the code, by Tower. He expressed his repentance and said the measure of a man is how he acts when he is alone. “The character of a man is in the dark,” he said.
Apart from the code, he was also found guilty of disclosing confidential details to the Tower officials. In spite of being in a very prestigious position in the company, the attempt by Samarth solely for the purpose of earning high bucks sets a bad example in the society. He was found guilty on November 19th 2010, and was sentenced 3 years of imprisonment in US, followed by 2 years of supervised release.
Source: NDTV