A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employee was arrested last Friday, accused of stealing the firm’s proprietary code that helps it generate millions of dollars each year in high-speed, high-volume trades, Bloomberg reported.

The software is worth millions of dollars, and if widely disseminated could cost the company even more in increased competition.

Sergey Aleynikov was arrested after arriving at Liberty International Airport in Newark, N.J., and charged with transferring Goldman’s code to a computer server in Germany, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti. He told a federal judge in a court appearance on July 4 in Manhattan that Goldman and U.S. markets may be harmed if the software is disseminated.

According to Larry Tabb, founder of TABB Group LLC, a financial-market research and advisory firm, someone could analyze the code to either make trades faster than Goldman, and thus take money away from the company, or perform the opposite strategy and make money at Goldman’s expense.

Defense attorney Sabrina Shroff argued that the government’s allegations are “preposterous,” and that Goldman was aware that Aleynikov was downloading programs to his personal computer to do work at home. She also claimed that only 32 of the 1,024 megabits of the software code were transferred.

Facciponti said that Aleynikov could disseminate the code “in 10 minutes” using a cell phone and that the government is trying to obtain access to the German server to see if other confidential data was transferred.

Aleynikov was about to join start-up company Teza Technologies LLC and engage in high-volume automated trading, prosecutors said. Teza has suspended Aleynikov without pay.