Rajaratnam convicted, what's next?
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 12 May 2011, 22:36 IST   |    4 Comments
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Rajaratnam convicted, what's next?
Bangalore: Caught in the insider trading conspiracy web, financial criminal Raj Rajaratnam has been sentenced for 20 years in prison. Rajaratnam, 53, was found guilty of five counts of conspiracy and nine counts of securities fraud on the jury's 12th day of deliberations. This proved that Rajaratnam was running a seven-year conspiracy. He made a bomb out of the show he ran. About $63.8 million is what the prosecutors claimed. He is said to be sentenced on July 29. But the hedge fund co-founder is all set to appeal against the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals. It is an uphill struggle, there's no question about it," Stephen Miller, a former federal prosecutor, said. "It is 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," Miller has quoted as saying to Bloomberg. "Appeals courts are more likely to reverse a judge's decision based on a legal argument than a factual finding based on the judge's conclusions," he said. It is said that Rajaratnam will face home detention for the time being until the trail is complete and then will be taken to prison once the final judgment is given. His Sutton Place in Manhattan will be under electronic monitoring and under tight security. John Dowd, attorney of Rajaratnam said that he will appeal for the use of the 40 recordings of wiretape that the jurors heard. Now that Rajaratnam has been convicted, the U.S. government attention will now return back to the sweeping insider trading investigation that began to explode in late 2010. The U.S. government will start the second phase of the probe which is called the expert network probe ideally. It will focus on the tips which were passed on by third-party "experts" and middlemen. The next chapter of the Rajaratnam case will begin with Goldman Sachs executives and McKinsey head, Rajat Gupta, Robert Moffat, an IBM executive, Rajiv Goel, an Intel Capital executive, and Anil Kumar, a McKinsey executive. The charging of these guys has taken a backseat as charging them so close to the beginning of Raj's trial, was viewed as prejudicial. Financial advisors and experts from Primary Global have been arrested and they have pleaded guilty as well. Primary Global is an expert network based company based in California. Traders who exchanged information with them are also charged. It looks like that the spotlight is moved on to SAC Capital's Stephen Cohen, who is the hedge fund manager and the founder of the company. SAC capital has drawn huge attention and curiosity as hedge funds launched by several former portfolio managers were raided and former traders have also pleaded guilty. Trades made in SAC account that Steve Cohen oversees are being examined by federal prosecutors, according to the WSJ. A $3 billion stock portfolio is personally overseen by Cohen at SAC which was actually brought to light when the filings were submitted to the court in connection with the Rajaratnam case. But the doubt deepens as Noah Freeman and Donald Longueuil who have both admitted to insider trading are former portfolio managers at SAC.

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