The WTF quotient of this bizarre case shoots up even higher.
Someone from Goldman is leaking anonymously that Gupta’s bills – to the tune of $30 million and counting – are being footed by Goldman itself. With Procter & Gamble picking up the rest.
Goldman foots bulk of Gupta’s $30M legal bill
For Goldman Sachs, the insider trading case against former board member Rajat Gupta which ended in a conviction Friday, was distracting and embarrassing. It has also been very expensive. Goldman Sachs has paid for the bulk of Gupta’s legal defense, which has cost nearly $30 million, according to two people with direct knowledge of the case who requested anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss it publicly. Procter & Gamble, on whose board Gupta also served, has picked up the balance of the bill. A jury found Gupta guilty of leaking Goldman’s private boardroom discussions to the former hedge fund titan Raj Rajaratnam. He was acquitted on a count related to divulging secrets about P&G. Gupta plans to appeal.”
Comment
[Lila, June 19, 2012. This has since been confirmed as factual and not a rumor or PR]
Hmm. We don’t think too much of anonymous leaking. Sounds like Goldman PR. The guy is coming off sympathetically, so maybe some one wants to stir up a little bad feeling. Kind of obvious.
They figured they’d axe the guy and everyone would be dancing in the streets and asking for blood. But most people seem to realize that even if Gupta did what he did, insider trading is a small time side-show on Wall Street. Not the really bad stuff. Most people get that.
And the Indian business world didn’t break down and sob with contrition either, which also flummoxed the ruling class. I mean what good is a psyop, if your target holds up his middle finger back at you?
Reuters ran a piece telling the Indian business community to get a better cause.
The Financial Times (pretty much a mouthpiece for the financial establishment) scolded them for showing support for Gupta.
Then it trotted out various Indian chamchas to pontificate about how corrupt Indian business is, which is true but irrelevant, since Indian business culture has nothing to do with what went on here.
Rajat Gupta lived all his life in the West. He graduated from Harvard Business School, for pete’s sake. The guy is a product of Western business culture. Go wag a finger at Harvard.
They even had one Gurcharan Das – must be a pretty naive guy – to come out with the proper attitude the wogs are supposed to take about all this. Notice that Gurcharan Das has a website that shows him speechifying at Tahrir Square (US Intel-led revolution)and advising Indians not to let a good crisis go to waste
(this is pure globalist-speak).
[June 19: Further conspiracy note: when I got up today and checked, I noticed that the reference to Tahrir Square etc. had been cut out from my blog post, even though I clearly remember saving it. I must be confused right? But then, when I checked Gurcharan Das’s website this morning, the video on the home page was no longer about Tahrir Square. It had been switched to something else. The Tahrir Square video had got tucked away inside. Hmm-mmm.]
“It’s the classic problem of status anxiety. It’s what we all suffer from in some form,” said Mr Das, who is the author most recently of The Difficulty of Being Good, a book that draws on the philosophical lessons of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.
“As head of McKinsey he was associating with CEOs and billionaires earning very large sums. His job was to advise people with a lot of capital, not to be an owner of capital. He got new ambitions.”
You’ll recognize the “greed” meme which the establishment pushed heavily to explain what happened.
That’s to distract from the rather obvious origins of the financial crisis in government policy abetted by the criminal actions of connected firms, and not in some generic evil capitalist greed curling around Wall Street like a miasma.
Mr Das also highlighted the “glaring” contrast between an erratic and slow-moving Indian legal system that often protects the well-connected, and the swift and harsh punishment handed out by the powerful US courts. “We sometimes catch [people] but we don’t convict,” he said.
“What the US system is saying is that no one is above the law.”
Poor dear Mr. Das. He must have been struck blind and deaf in the past decade if he believes that “in the US system no one is above the law”.
But I guess, even though Das is doing the talking, he’s really a sock puppet, for his masters.
Like this chap, remember him?
But back to Goldman footing Gupta’s bills. Say it’s not just clever PR from Goldman. Say it’s true.
Why would they do that?
Probably because they really wanted Gupta to get off? If he’s been a corporate wise man all these years, he’s bound to know where some bodies are buried. Lord knows what he’s going to start saying around sentencing time.
[Or maybe they want to make sure the crowd gets someone to pay for all the excesses of the last few decade. At Forbes, Richard Levick apparently thinks Gupta deserves the harshest sentence possible just because he didn’t make money on the tip, but wanted to become a bigger player..]
Still, I had no idea that criminal defense teams were part of the severance package at these places. Maybe it has to be.
Given what we know about Wall Street culture, an individually-wrapped securities lawyer is a non-negotiable perk, like stock options, or something.
Or maybe, I wonder if it doesn’t tell us something else. May be if they’re footing the bill for Gupta, they’re also picking the lawyer. (Naftalis and Bharara are old friends (I originally wrote Rakoff, but I now read that Bharara is a friend of Naftalis, as well, and I can’t find the place I read the reference to Rakoff, so I’ve deleted it))
And maybe if that’s the case, this is even more of a set-up than I thought.