Pittsburgh_Patrika_July_2017_Issue

The Pittsburgh Patrika, Vol, 22, No. 4, July 2017
Desi Transitions: Insider Trader Rajat Gupta
Blames the Aggressive Prosecutor and the
Jury System for His Jail Term
By Kollengode S Venkataraman
Rajat Gupta
Rajat Gupta, alumnus of IIT-Bombay (1971) and Harvard Business
School MBA (1973), was the youngest and the first foreign-born managing
director at McKinsey & Co. He was barely 45
when became the chief executive of McKensey. His
background is the stereotypical Bengali Bhadralok
— his father was a journalist and professor, and his
mother taught in a Montessori school.
His parents died when he was in his teens. He was
brilliant in his studies.
His meteoric career on Wall Street as a foreignborn
Wall Street executive was a model for ambitious
Indian business school graduates. He was a board
member at Goldman Sachs, Proctor & Gamble and AMR (the holding
company of American Airlines); and he was in many big-banner global
philanthropies fighting AIDS, TB, malaria…
Gupta is also a convicted felon. In 2012 Gupta was given a 2-year
prison term and a one-year supervised release, plus a $5 million fine for
insider trading. The jury convicted him for colluding with billionaire Raj
Rajaratnam, the hedge fund manager
of Galleon Group, then one of
the largest hedge funds. Gupta’s net
worth at that time was around $100
million. Savor the irony that Gupta’s
parents, as reported in the
Economic Times in India, were
communists.
In his first interview after
coming out of prison, Gupta
talked, not to any US print media in
New York such as the Wall Street
Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon Group (L) and
Rajat Gupt (R) with US Treasury Secretary
Henry Paulson (Center) in his Halcyon days.
Journal, New York Times, where he made his mark in his career and his
millions, but to Vikas Dhoot of The Hindu. The interview was published
in March 2017 under the title “Had a Good Time in Prison.” See here:
www.tinyurl.com/RajatGupta-Good-Time-in-Prison.
In the interview, Gupta blamed the “politically ambitious” prosecutor
Preet Barara, “the signs of the time,” and a judicial system and a sys-
10