I've got to say, I've got a lot less sympathy for Xu than most people in this thread seem to have. Firstly, what he did was absolutely unacceptable, he didn't just copy stuff, he went out of his way to break security procedures at the company he worked at to steal other people's hard work. He then literally fled the country knowing exactly what he was doing. He trafficked in stolen goods handing the IP to his family in China where he knew that the company would never get it back. He got his family to lie in court about the entire thing. He still wont admit what he stole and we all know that the second he goes free he can travel to China and sell the stolen IP. Unfortunately for Xu, because his family lied in court about destroying the IP and because he is from China where we all know any chance of enforcing any contracts is nil, any return to China is basically a sign off allowing him to profit from his stolen IP. So again, I perfectly understand why G-Research wants to stop him, every extra month in prison is another month where he can't hand over their IP to competitors.
I'm sorry but that is a whole head of red flags. Meanwhile, people seem to have a problem with G-Research in what they did to track him down. They tried to stop him travelling - seems pretty reasonable since he fled the country. They tried to stop him leaving HK - seems pretty reasonable since he tried to leave and succeeded in smuggling IP worth millions into mainland china. They hired PIs to watch his family - seems pretty reasonable since they actually DID participate in the crime and lie about it!
I feel sorry for the guy but this really does seem like an example of someone doing pretty much the worst thing they can do in a situation and doing it to the most powerful person they could.
G-Research's actions prior to Xu's initial conviction could be considered reasonable.
However their later actions to continue to push for additional jail time and to harass UK government entities when they didn't get the desired response seem less reasonable.
It seems like they're using the UK criminal justice system to attempt to scare people, which is not its intended function.
Scaring people is one of the main functions of a justice system. The whole reason police go for big newsmaking busts is that it's more effective at scaring people.
I agree that his actions would end up in lawsuits anywhere in modern world, and I understand the attempt of former employers to block him as much as legally possible. Kudos to employer for not simply hiring a hitman.
That said - who in all honesty will root for some paranoid vengeful billionaire? I couldn't care less if he loses some 30 millions in his multi-billion empire. Which, according to the article, shouldn't be the case - strategies expired, the secret isn't worth anything anymore, and this is just bullying and revenge, because he can and his ego got hurt. With almost 100% guarantee he is 'optimizing' everything to Guernsey he can tax-wise, so British citizens don't see anything from his vast income.
Not much sympathy for some little man with big ego and even bigger wallet.
Well let's be clear about the stakes of this. Firstly, the billionaire isn't going to lose anything - he owns a company with dozens of different strategies. The people who will lose out are the other engineers who designed and built those strategies and now can't use them anymore. Even the risk of those stategies being out in the wild opens them up to the risk of a competitor exploiting their expected behaviour, so lot's of their work is going to have to be re-engineered. Secondly, whilst $30m doesn't threaten the company, having former employees thinking they can walk off with the secret sauce does threaten the existence of the company. So it's not surprising the most famous example of this is the one that's going to get the strongest enforcement.
There is standard codified punishment for what you describe - it isn't anything special to quant trading, we can talk about secret sauce of many IT companies, or companies in general. Some dev walks out of Google with their Search code/data would be much more scary and damaging.
What we see here is punishment for the sake of punishment, from person who is clearly amoral according to anything you can find on him online (quite a bit). All I say is I have no sympathy for him and the case, which btw even the company itself originally claimed would expire in +-August 2018. Yet they still go for revenge. That's pathetic and clear abuse of legal system from my viewpoint.
Here's the thing though: Even knowing the whole story, that a jerk billionaire is flexing his full legal force on Xu to make his life as hellacious as possible, doesn't change that Xu is a complete shitbird.
Xu did a bad thing. End. It doesn't matter who he did the bad thing, we can all agree that it's a bad thing to lie cheat and steal for personal financial gain. The other player in the story doesn't make it acceptable. But people want to shift the narrative to "but what about how bad G-Research is" and that's just the consequence of the first bad action.
I'm sorry but that is a whole head of red flags. Meanwhile, people seem to have a problem with G-Research in what they did to track him down. They tried to stop him travelling - seems pretty reasonable since he fled the country. They tried to stop him leaving HK - seems pretty reasonable since he tried to leave and succeeded in smuggling IP worth millions into mainland china. They hired PIs to watch his family - seems pretty reasonable since they actually DID participate in the crime and lie about it!
I feel sorry for the guy but this really does seem like an example of someone doing pretty much the worst thing they can do in a situation and doing it to the most powerful person they could.