Rajat Gupta gets Gates, Anan backing for light sentence
13 Oct 2012
Rajat Gupta, the Indian expatriate convicted in the USA for insider trading, has got the support of some of the biggest names in international business and politics.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan were among 200 important people asking that the presiding judge go light on Gupta, considering his actively philanthropic background.
Letters by the prominent personalities in support of Gupta were made public yesterday by New York district judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan.
Gupta, 63, was close to Raj Rajaratnam, the Sri Lankan who headed the Galleon Group hedge fund which is the key to the broad insider trading crackdown that started in 2009. Rajaratanam has already been sentenced to 11 years in prison; but it looks increasingly unlikely that Gupta will receive a heavy sentence.
Gupta, a former head of the McKinsey & Co management consultancy, moved in elite business and philanthropic circles for decades.
A jury convicted Gupta in June of tipping his friend Raj Rajaratnam about Goldman's boardroom secrets during the financial meltdown of the late previous decade.
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