Why did rich Rajat Gupta turn to grubby business of insider trading?

I saw Rajat Gupta once, at a Wharton School conference, moving through the crowd like a well-mannered panther. He had a nice laugh, and the kind of sleekness I tend to associate with actors, politicians, and TV evangelists. Presumably he's still like that now, perhaps minus the laugh. Facing as much as 105 years in prison for alleged insider trading can't be good for the mood, especially when you're almost 63. After a long and successful career as a corporate adviser, the former CEO of McKinsey, one of the world's most successful consultancies, has landed in about as bad a strategic position as you could imagine. Federal prosecutors claim that Gupta, as a director of Goldman Sachs and of Procter & Gamble, leaked information to his friend and business associate Raj Rajaratnam, the CEO of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, about key corporate developments right after he learned of them in his board meetings. The Feds have phone records, and the inconvenient fact that Galleon bought or sold huge blocks of stock in these companies right after these calls. All in all, it doesn't look good. The Wise Man What makes this scandal more disturbing in some respects than other recent corporate scandals is that Gupta made his name as a professional wise man. Unlike say a George Soros who had a few decades of sharp-elbowed trading before he graduated to a statesman, Gupta seems to have sprung full grown from the brow of the Harvard Business School, becoming a partner in the world's most famous business consultancy by age 32, by 46, the first Indian-born CEO of a multinational corporation. Most of the time, it's easy to spot fatal flaws that lead to a final unraveling, especially in retrospect. Think of Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Bill Clinton and their womanising, or the countless politicos undone by liquor. Greed too is usually apparent. But Gupta - friend, father, philanthropist - seems in his public image to look as if he should be above a career as a corporate spy. The charges seem odd. The story prosecutors tell isn't just that he dropped an imprudent word in someone's ear at a party or gave a relative a stock tip but that he would call up immediately after the end of a series of board meetings in 2008 and 2009. In fact, he filed the news of his corporate board meetings with the speed and diligence of a Reuter's reporter out to scoop Bloomberg, once just 16 seconds after the meeting broke up. So why did Gupta do it, if he did it? Why would a man with four houses and a $100 million risk everything by sending in all these dispatches? I start with a bit of web research on his rapid and unlikely rise - the Calcutta boy orphaned at 18, who helped keep his siblings together, who excelled at the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi, who wowed them all at Harvard Business School, and cracked the glass ceiling at McKinsey, the most elite management consultancy. No one has a bad word to say about him.

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