First Goldman Sachs, Now UBS: Another Allegation of Departing Employee Trade Secret Theft of Source Code

SecuritiesIndustry.com is reporting that Goldman Sachs is not the only Wall Street firm taking an ex-employee to court with the charge of theft of trade secrets in the form of valuable, proprietary trading code.

Swiss bank UBS AG confirmed Monday that it filed papers in March charging three ex-employees with “misappropriation of trade secrets.” The “misappropriation” included 25,000 lines of source code used in UBS’s “trade secret algorithmic trading programs,” according to documents submitted with the New York State Supreme Court.

The bank is charging three former employees in the firm’s algorithmic trading group of having “collectively coordinated and planned together” to move to new jobs at New York-based Jefferies & Company while still technically in the employee of UBS, taking with them UBS trade secrets, breaching their employment contracts and fiduciary duties and resulting in unfair competition.

The three charged are: Jatin Suryawanshi, the former managing director and head of the unit; Partha Sarkar, an executive director and Sanjay Girdhar, a group director. In June, Jefferies publicly announced that Saryawanshi had joined the firm as a managing director and head of its global quantitative strategies trading unit while Sarkar and Girdhar had joined the unit as senior vice presidents.