WASHINGTON – Convicted hedge fund tycoon Raj Rajaratnam claims US prosecutors pressed him to “wear a wire” and record conversations with his Indian-American friend Rajat Gupta, Goldman Sachs Group Inc director.
In his first interview about his case, Sri Lanka born Rajaratnam told Newsweek Daily Beast that he was initially asked on the day of his Oct 16, 2009 arrest to tape his conversations with Gupta, the former CEO of elite consultancy McKinsey & Co McKinsey.
As late as two weeks before Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading, he was still being asked by the government to turn on Gupta.
But he wouldn’t wear a wire, he says, so he could sleep at night. “They wanted me to plea-bargain. They want to get Rajat. I am not going to do what people did to me. Rajat has four daughters,” he said referring to Gupta as a “firstclass guy.”
A spokesman for Gupta’s lawyer, Gary Naftalis, referred to previous statements that his client had done nothing wrong and that a civil case brought by the US securities and exchange commission was baseless. But Rajaratnam felt betrayed by his Indian American Wharton classmates, Anil Kumar and Rajiv Goel, on whose testimony the case mainly rests.
