The former employees group didn't steal shit and still got lawyers up their ass the whole time.
The article says they even sued former employees (that were not accused of stealing) for simply having the audacity to start a company in the same field.
>At around that time, de Putron got involved in another legal dispute that foreshadowed his companies’ campaign against Xu. The year before, a group of five programmers and managers had left G-Research, then known as GR Software & Research Ltd., to start their own trading outfit. The company responded by first threatening a lawsuit, then, in 2011, by filing one. None of the filings suggested anything had been stolen, but G-Research argued that the five had developed their quant-trading skills at the company, and so any new platform would have to be similar and an infringement of its intellectual property.
Intellectual property contracts are common in finance. I had a clause that, if enforced, would have prevented me to work for two years in the industry, while offering half my usual salary in the meantime. I think it's fair (doesn't hold you off forever and also doesn't starve you while you're out of the game). In my case, it wasn't enforced when I left (which is more bad news for me than good, since it just means I wasn't valuable enough :)