Wall Street success story comes to an end

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#1
The sorry tale of Rajaratnam......sigh.

May 13, 2011
insider trading
Wall Street success story comes to an end


NEW YORK: For years, Raj Rajaratnam was lionised as one of Wall Street's savviest investors. At its peak, the Galleon Group hedge fund he co-founded managed more than US$7 billion (S$8.7 billion) in assets.

Wednesday's verdict marks an end to a Wall Street success story.

Born in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo to a relatively well-off family, Rajaratnam, 53, got a degree in engineering at the University of Sussex in Britain. He went to the United States in 1981 to study business at the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Two of his Wharton classmates - Anil Kumar, who became a partner at McKinsey & Co, and Rajiv Goel, who was a top executive at Intel - testified against him at the trial, telling jurors how their relationships began at the school and how they turned to crime.

Upon graduation, Rajaratnam headed for Wall Street. His first job was at Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was a lending officer in the group that made loans to high-tech companies.

In 1985, he joined Needham & Co, a small investment bank that specialised in technology and health-care companies. He rapidly became a success, winning underwriting business for Needham and impressing many technology companies with the diligence of his research. By 1991, he was made president.

In November 1996, with former colleagues at Needham, he founded Galleon, a technology hedge fund. Investors clamoured to put their money with him and Galleon was managing almost US$1 billion by the end of the following year. It attracted clients like New Jersey's state pension fund and UBS, the giant Swiss bank.

Galleon brought Rajaratnam great wealth, estimated by Forbes magazine at US$1.3 billion. During the trial, Rajaratnam's former friends told the jury about lavish vacations. For his 50th birthday, he chartered a private jet to fly dozens of family members and friends for a safari in Kenya.

As early as 1999, investigators say they were looking at Rajaratnam, who is married with three children, but it was almost a decade later that they sought permission from a judge to tap the hedge fund manager's phone.

Fiercely competitive, Rajaratnam could be heard on wiretaps speaking in sports and military metaphors. He compared himself to fighting Muhammad Ali in the ring and said during the financial crisis: 'I'm feeling the pain, but they can't kill me. I'm a warrior.'

NEW YORK TIMES, BLOOMBERG

The accomplices

THE SAD SACK

'Hey, get me a job with one of your powerful friends, man,' Rajiv Goel, the Intel executive, urged Rajaratnam.

The request was textbook Goel. Some 30 years after they met at Wharton, Goel was a dissatisfied mid-level manager while Rajaratnam was a hedge fund titan.

Goel gave his friend advance word of Intel's earnings results and a US$1 billion investment.

In return, Rajaratnam lent or gave Goel a total of US$600,000. He also earned about US$750,000 for Goel by trading on inside information in Goel's account at Schwab.

THE HEDGE FUND TEMPTRESS

Her platinum blonde locks and bold manner turned heads in the tech world and on Wall Street.

Danielle Chiesi (above), a former beauty queen, was well aware of that attention and used it to her advantage in the male-dominated world of hedge funds, where she plied her trade at New Castle Partners.

'I just got a call from my guy,' she told Rajaratnam in one call, referring to a source. 'I played him like a finely tuned piano.'

Chiesi had an affair with Robert Moffatt, a former executive at IBM who is serving jail time after admitting passing confidential information to her.

She also had an affair with her boss, Mark Kurland, who also pleaded guilty to insider trading.

Squeezing information from corporate insiders excited Chiesi. 'It's a conquest,' she told Rajaratnam. 'It's mentally fabulous for me.'

THE RELUCTANT ACCESSORY

Anil Kumar earned several million dollars a year as a senior executive at McKinsey. He had a gruelling schedule, travelling some 50,000km a month.

In 2003, Rajaratnam told his business school classmate that he was underpaid.

Kumar would later depict himself as a reluctant felon, initially rejecting Rajaratnam's offer. But after they devised an elaborate scheme to hide the payments, he began moonlighting as a private consultant to Rajaratnam.

NEW YORK TIMES


Business Times - 13 May 2011

Wiretaps sink Galleon founder in insider case


Phone recordings lead to guilty verdict for 'unsympathetic' defendant

By JOYCE HOOI

(SINGAPORE) The conviction of Raj Rajaratnam, the man at the centre of the largest insider trading case in 30 years, will push into existence a new corollary to the phrase 'Keep your friends close but your enemies closer'. Traders, rogue or otherwise, will do well to tag on 'Close enough, so that you will not have to talk to them on the phone'.

The use of damning wiretapped phone recordings in Mr Rajaratnam's trial has been credited with bringing about a resounding guilty verdict on all of the charges against him - 14 in all - five for conspiracy and nine for securities fraud.

It did not help that Mr Rajaratnam, 53, was said to be 'a highly unsympathetic defendant whose own words tightened the noose around his neck', by Andrew Stoltmann, a partner at Stoltmann Law Offices PC in Chicago, according to Reuters.

His arrest in 2009 had eventually led to the closing down of his hedge fund's Singapore arm, Galleon Asia, which had functioned as Asia's headquarters with about US$1 billion under management at the time.

While Mr Rajaratnam's attorney, John Dowd, has said that the founder of hedge fund Galleon Group will appeal Wednesday's verdict to the US Court of Appeals in Manhattan, the odds do not look good for Mr Rajaratnam.

'It's an uphill struggle, there's no question about it,' Stephen Miller, a former federal prosecutor, told Bloomberg.

'It's always hard, once you have a judge making credibility findings of any sort for the appellate court to review it, especially in a case of this magnitude.'

In terms of magnitude, Mr Rajaratnam's case weighs heavily on one end of the spectrum. Prosecutors have accused the well-connected Sri Lankan native of making US$63.8 million over a seven-year period, trading inside information with a web of bankers, consultants and other hedge fund traders.

The companies traded were also large on the name-recognition scale: Advanced Micro Devices Inc, Goldman Sachs, Hilton Hotels Corp and Google Inc, among others.

Among the 60-odd wiretapped conversations that the jury heard was one in May 2008, in which Mr Rajaratnam phoned Rajat Gupta who was then a director at Goldman Sachs.

'There's a rumour that Goldman might look to buy a commercial bank ... have you heard anything along that line?' Mr Rajaratnam asked him.

Mr Gupta replied, 'Yeah. There was a big discussion at the board meeting on whether we buy a commercial bank and ... it's a divided discussion on the board ... they are an opportunistic group, so if Wachovia is a good deal, it's quite conceivable that Goldman will buy Wachovia.'

Mr Gupta has denied any wrongdoing and has not been criminally charged.

Some amount of back-stabbing had taken place, as well. After getting tipoffs from Anil Kumar, then a partner at McKinsey, Mr Rajaratnam dismissed him as someone trying to be a 'mini-Rajat' in a phonecall with Mr Gupta, in July 2008. In January this year, Mr Kumar pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud.

If Mr Rajaratnam's appeal fails, he will face a prison term of 15 1/2 years to 19 1/2 years when he is sentenced on July 29, according to Home Detention Prosecutors quoted by Bloomberg.

Until then, Mr Rajaratnam - once the 559th richest person in the world with a fortune of US$1.3 billion, according to Forbes Magazine in 2009 - will be held under home detention and electronic monitoring at his home in Manhattan.

While the admission of the wiretapped conversations might have made this a clear-cut 12 days of deliberation for the jury, it might make future cases without wiretapped evidence harder for the prosecution.

'It's powerful evidence; you can't deny your words on tape,' Rita Glavin, a former federal prosecutor told Associated Press.

'Jurors may expect in the future for all insider trading cases to hear wiretaps. If you don't have wiretaps, the government now is going to be at a disadvantage.'


May 13, 2011
insider trading
Hedge fund titan tripped up by wiretapping

46 recorded phone calls by authorities offered 'devastating' evidence

NEW YORK: Raj Rajaratnam might have fared better had he just shut up.

His conviction on Wednesday on all 14 counts in the biggest insider trading case in decades was anchored in 46 tapped phone calls that prosecutors called 'devastating' evidence of insider trading.

Prosecutors had alleged that illegal tips from insiders leaking valuable corporate information between 2003 and March 2009 allowed the 53-year-old Rajaratnam to make profits and avoid losses totalling US$63.8 million (S$80 million).

His Galleon Group fund, they said, became a multibillion-dollar success at the expense of ordinary stock investors who did not have the advance notice he enjoyed of mergers, acquisitions and earnings reports.

The co-founder of one of the biggest hedge funds in the United States could face at least 15 years in prison when he is sentenced on July 29.

The US government's unprecedented use of extensive phone tapping, which is more often deployed in organised crime and drug trafficking probes, may have marked a turning point in the prosecution of white collar crimes.

In previous insider trading cases, the investigation started only after someone noticed suspicious trading, like the purchase of a stock just before a takeover offer was announced or the short sale of the stock just before bad earnings news was released.

But that technique is all but useless if the suspect is a hedge fund manager like Rajaratnam. His firm made dozens, if not hundreds, of trades every day. It had a bevy of analysts and access to all the research by Wall Street firms. If a trade were somehow questioned, the firm could come up with any number of reasonable sounding explanations.

The defence had argued that the tapes revealed nothing more than that Rajaratnam was doing his duty by asking questions about information already circulating in the 'real world' of high finance.

'That happens every day on Wall Street,' chief defence lawyer John Dowd told the jury. 'There's nothing wrong with it.'

But those explanations sounded pretty lame when stacked up against the 46 incriminating recordings of conversations for the jurors over the course of his two-month trial.

Those tapes exist only because the US Justice Department got involved in the investigation at the beginning. Presumably, it had reason to believe that insider trading was happening, and that persuaded a judge to approve wiretaps.

The jury heard how Rajaratnam worked his mobile phone even when he was on holiday on a beach in Miami or in Europe, making arrangements to deposit money into accounts for friends who had given him tips.

The tipsters included executives at major blue chip companies such as former Intel treasury group executive Rajiv Goel and Rajat Gupta, who was once head of elite management consultancy McKinsey & Co and sat on the board of investment banking titan Goldman Sachs.

Mr Dowd said Rajaratnam will appeal against the case. In particular, he is expected to challenge the use of secret recordings.

Prosecutors said Rajaratnam traded illegally on at least 15 stocks, many of them technology companies such as chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices and search engine Google.

In potentially one of the most damning exchanges, Rajaratnam was heard discussing information he had received from Gupta about Goldman, including the first quarterly loss in its history in 2008.

'I just heard from somebody who's on the board of Goldman Sachs, they are gonna lose US$2 per share,' Rajaratnam was heard telling a colleague on one call.

Rajaratnam was also heard trading secrets and orchestrating cover-ups with fellow hedge fund manager Danielle Chiesi, who pleaded guilty in the case.

'I mean, I think this stock could go up US$10, you know? But we got to keep this radio silence,' Rajaratnam said in one tape. 'Oh, please. That is my pleasure,' Chiesi responded.

'Not even to your little boyfriends, you know?'

'No, believe me, I don't have friends,' she replied.

Rajaratnam advised Chiesi to buy one million shares of a tech stock on an inside tip, then sell 500,000 of those shares - a tactic prosecutors say was used to throw regulators off the trail.

Another witness, former McKinsey consultant Anil Kumar, testified that he and Rajaratnam broke the law by speaking regularly about the negotiations over the acquisition of ATI Technologies by Kumar's client, Advanced Micro Devices, before the deal was announced.

Prosecutors say Rajaratnam raked in US$20 million by trading on his advance notice of the ATI-AMD deal. When Rajaratnam later informed Kumar that he would be rewarded with a $1 million kickback, 'I almost fell off my chair', the witness said.

REUTERS, NEW YORK TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS, BLOOMBERG

HARD FALL FOR A HIGH-FLIER

'Rajaratnam, once a high-flying billionaire and hedge fund manager, is now a convicted felon, 14 times over... Rajaratnam was among the best and the brightest - one of the most educated, successful and privileged professionals in the country. Yet, like so many others recently, he let greed and corruption cause his undoing.'
Mr Preet Bharara, the US attorney for Manhattan, whose office led the probe

WIRETAPS A GAME CHANGER

'I view the use of wiretaps as a game changer and something that certainly the defence bar has taken notice of and I think that Wall Street has taken notice of.'
Mr Kenneth Herzinger, a former attorney in the Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement division, predicting wiretaps use expanding to other white-collar prosecutions

UNFAIR FOR ORDINARY INVESTOR

'The stock market is designed to make sure the investing public isn't cheated. Wall Street is supposed to be an even playing field.'
Mr Reed Brodsky, a prosecutor, saying that Rajaratnam's activities provided Wall Street professionals with an unfair advantage over the ordinary investor
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