Nobody who's appeared in her court has pissed off Judge Rochford more than Mikhail "Misha" Malyshev, a former Citadel high frequency trader who was sued by the company for trying to start a competing company and taking, or now having access to, Citadel's confidential information, including high-frequency trading methods. Rochmol told the Chicago Tribune that in court, Malyshev's conduct and testimony were "more egregious than anything encountered before" in her experience. She might have been referring to Malyshev's defense. Citadel and its founder Ken Griffin had complained that Malyshev, who began his career as a plasma physicist and then went on to lead Citadel's high-frequency trading group, agreed to a non-compete. The firm sued him after he and his colleague, Jace Kohlmeier, left in February 2009 to form their own securities trading firm, Teza Technologies LLC. (Important sidenote: Teza Tech is where Sergey Aleynikov, the guy who Goldman Sachs sued for stealing company code, starting working a day after leaving the company.) Later, when the court discovered that Malyshev used "scrubbing" software on his home computer, he gave the court an unusual defense. He said the only active files deleted were porn. His exact words were, ahem: "I am addicted to hard-core internet pornography and wiped my hard-drive clean to save myself the embarrassment of being examined about the forensic details of my addiction," according to an old blog post about the case. And that attitude made the judge red. Of course Citadel and Griffin were insanely pissed too. They were losing the men whose department made the fund more than $1 billion in 2008, and gaining a competitor. The fund requested the judge fine him $15 million, or one-tenth of his take-home in 2008, $150 million. And today, we find out the actual fine levied against Malyshev, in the Chicago Tribune. Malyshev sent $553,049.24 to each organization, the Greater Chicago Food Depository and the Coordinated Advice and Referral Program for Legal Services (CARPLS), about a week ago, according to his lawyer, Chris Gair of Jenner & Block, after withdrawing his appeal of the judge's sanction. So he had to pay $1.1 million, and it's a tax write off. And we're left wondering what might've happened if he didn't delete any porn. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/mikhail-misha-malyshev-porn-hft-citadel-2010-10#ixzz14jFScEpz
Citadel gets what it deserves. They could have paid him more and kept him, instead the greedy bastards thought they could fly the plane without the pilot and make more for themselves.
Yeah, Ken Griffin still thinks he runs the show. Nevertheless, endless set backs regarding his investment banking ambitions have shown where he belongs. A hedge fund boutique remains a hedge fund boutique.
Why did they just completely destroy the HD's? Set them on fire, drill them and soak em' in bleach or acid. They had to know something might happen.
That would have been too obvious...contempt perhaps and obstruction...besides physically damaging disks is no guarantee u got all data...vanishing or vaporizing is the only 100% solution. But professional/military grade wiping software that does a 33 pass wipe and overwrite is probably a safer alternative and guarantee that your data is completely gone.
On that note besides Evidence Eliminator what are the good ones out there? Any IT experts to chime in?
This one has been around for years www.killdisk.com But if you want to really protect your data also encrypt it with either PGP Office the commercial product or the free open source offering from TrueCrypt.org.