A former financial trader for Société Générale has been jailed for three years for stealing proprietary high-frequency trading software from the French investment bank, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Samarth Agrawal printed out copies of the code in 2009, with the intention of building a similar system for a competitor, a court in New York heard. He was convicted of stealing trade secrets and transporting stolen property.

Agrawal had been given access to the code in order to work on an integration project on weekends. He admitted – under questioning from his own lawyer – that he shared details of the software with one of Soc Gen’s rivals.