US Federal agents arrested a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, at Newark Liberty International Airport on July 3 on charges that he tried to steal the proprietary programming code used by the investment bank in its lucrative stock and commodities trading.

Aleynikov, a Russian-born US citizen, was paid $400,000 a year as a vice president of equity strategy at Goldman, which he joined in May 2007. He has said he was offered $1.2m to leave Goldman and join a new trading firm in Chicago that the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a court filing described as “intended to engage in high-volume automated trading,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Goldman cooperated with the FBI after its security systems discovered 39-year old Aleynikov’s alleged theft of 32 megabytes of data.