Cook County Sheriffs Police indict millionaire hedge fund trader for perjury

Bond has been set at $100,000 for a Chicago man accused of perjuring himself in court, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart announced Thursday. Mikhail Malyshev, 41, of the 100 block of Garrison Avenue in Wilmette was indicted on two counts of perjury, a class 3 felony, and appeared in bond court on Wednesday. The Cook County Sheriff’s Police Financial Crimes Unit began an investigation into Malyshev after his former employer, Citadel Investment Group, filed a lawsuit in July 2009 alleging he stole trade secrets and violated a covenant not to compete. Malyshev worked for Citadel for six years, earning more than $200 million dollars developing the computer code that controlled the company’s high frequency trading strategies. Malyshev left Citadel in February, 2009 and one month later formed his own company, Teza Technologies LLC. Immediately after Citadel filed suit, the two parties entered into a protective order, agreeing not to delete electronic information within their control. Months later, during a deposition under oath related to Citadel’s lawsuit, Malyshev admitted to running a “scrubbing” software program on two home computers, but claimed it was only “for a few minutes” in order to delete embarrassing pornographic images from the hard drive. In fact, Malyshev ran the programs for 41 minutes on one computer and nearly two hours on the other. As a result, a significant quantity of data was permanently destroyed. Malyshev later filed a sworn affidavit in court, claiming he had not deleted any “active files” from his computers. He repeated this claim at a court hearing in September 2009. However, computer forensics revealed Malyshev did delete active files from his computers in addition to running the scrubbing program. When confronted with these facts, Malyshev admitted he had lied in his affidavit, at his deposition, and in court. As a result, Malyshev was charged with perjury. In addition, Malyshev recently received civil sanctions in excess of $1 million for destroying potentially relevant data and lying to the court to conceal his conduct. Maylshev is a dual citizen of the United States and Russia. His next court date is April 7th at 26th and California.