MOSCOW, August 10 - RAPSI. Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov has been charged with the unlawful use of secret scientific material and the duplication of computer related material, both Class E felonies, in connection with his alleged theft of the investment firm’s sensitive source code, New York City prosecutors announced Thursday.

Goldman Sachs is among the most prominent investment banking firms on Wall Street. While working for the firm, Aleynikov was responsible for the development and maintenance of a complex computer program that facilitated its high-traffic global trading system. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. described the code as, “so highly confidential that it is known in the industry as the firm’s ‘secret sauce… Employees who exploit their access to sensitive information should expect to face criminal prosecution in New York State in appropriate cases.”

Prosecutors claim that in 2009, Aleynikov resigned from Goldman Sachs in order to accept a job at Chicago-based trading firm Teza, where he would be responsible for the creation of another high-traffic trading computer program built to compete with that of Goldman Sachs. Aleynikov allegedly copied hundreds of thousands of lines of source code from the Goldman Sachs program on his last day with the firm.

Aleynikhov was convicted and sentenced in a federal case stemming from the same facts in 2011, but his conviction was overturned on appeal.