Ex-Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta’s attorney has urged an appeals court panel to overturn their client’s insider- trading conviction arguing that wiretap evidence used by the prosecution should not have been introduced at trial.
Attorney Seth Waxman told the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan that Rajat Gupta never got a fair chance to prove his innocence because his daughter was not permitted to testify about how angry her father was at a billionaire hedge fund founder in 2008 when he supposedly was feeding him lucrative inside information.
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"Gupta himself was not heard on the wiretaps, which are instead conversations between convicted Galleon Group manager Raj Rajaratnam and other employees at the hedge fund. Those wiretaps should never have been admitted," Waxman told a three-judge panel hearing the high-profile case.
"The prosecution’s case rested exclusively on circumstantial evidence, and predominantly on wiretap statements — not of Gupta, but of Raj Rajaratnam, a highly unreliable declarant, speaking with other people with no connection to Gupta," Seth Waxman and Gary Naftalis, Gupta’s lawyers said in a brief to the appeals court.
Gupta received a prison sentence of two years in federal prison in October 2012. He was accused of conspiracy and securities fraud crimes stemming from his involvement in an insider trading scheme with his business partner and friend, Rajaratnam, the founder and former head of the Galleon Group hedge fund.
Gupta was convicted on one count of conspiracy and three counts of securities fraud in June 2012. The jury acquitted him on another two securities fraud counts.
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By GlobalDataGupta, a Harvard-educated businessman and Westport, Conn., resident, attended the appeals arguments. He declined to comment afterwards.
