Checking in with Rajat Gupta, former head of the McKinsey & Co consulting firm, and things don’t look good. As of Thursday it’s looking like the New York federal judge presiding over Gupta’s insider trading case will not be throwing out wiretap evidence for the trial, Thomson Reuters reports.
The U.S. government’s investigation of Wall Street insider trading, in which Gupta is a prominent villain, used a good deal of secretly recorded phone conversations as evidence in its prosecutions. Gupta, a board member of both Goldman Sachs and Proctor & Gamble, is accused of passing trade secrets from Goldman and P&G to hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam in 2008 and 2009. Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison in May, with wiretap evidence playing a large role in his conviction.
At least two of those recordings were conversations between Rajaratnam and Gupta, so unsurprisingly, Gupta’s lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff to keep them from being heard by the jury. At a pre-trial hearing on Thursday, however, Rakoff seemed less than keen to do so.
"This is a different defendant and he may be entitled to be heard on this issue but looking at it realistically, if I were the defense I would not be too optimistic about this particular motion," Rakoff said.
