John Marshall Mantel for The New York TimesRajat K. Gupta, left, and his lawyer, Gary Naftalis, last week after Mr. Gupta was charged with insider trading.
On Sept. 23, 2008, Rajat K. Gupta called Raj Rajaratnam after a Goldman Sachs board meeting and told the hedge fund manager secrets about the bank, according to an indictment unsealed last week.
That same day, Mr. Gupta had two doctor appointments, dined with Ethiopia’s health minister and got a haircut.
His calendar for Sept. 23, 2008 — entered into evidence during Mr. Rajaratnam’s trial as Government Exhibit 3035 — provides a lens into the busy and influential life of Mr. Gupta at a time when federal prosecutors say he was also breaking the law.
Mr. Gupta, then 59, was an éminence grise in the worlds of international business and philanthropy, juggling his work as a senior partner at McKinsey, the elite management consulting firm that he had once run, with his public company directorships, investment activities and charitable pursuits.
After an early morning call with an executive in Qatar, Mr. Gupta spent the next several hours with physicians. He also sandwiched in a 15-minute haircut at an establishment called Rudy’s before being driven into Manhattan from his home in Westport, Conn.
Mr. Gupta did not get to his office at McKinsey until 2 p.m., the calendar says. He then had back-to-back meetings with Sandeep Tyagi, chairman of Estee Advisors, a money management firm based in Singapore, and K. Balasubramanian, a board member of the GMR Group, an infrastructure investment business in Bangalore, India.
The Goldman call came at 3 p.m. He participated in a 38-minute telephonic board meeting during which the bank approved a $5 billion investment by Warren E. Buffett — news that the convulsing stock market, and Goldman’s investors, would surely love.
The government highlighted Mr. Gupta’s Sept. 23 schedule at the Rajaratnam trial during the testimony of Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman’s chief executive.
The calendar established for the jury that the Goldman board meeting took place when it did. Then, using a phone log, prosecutors showed that Mr. Gupta called Mr. Rajaratnam immediately afterward. Minutes later, just before the stock market closed, Mr. Rajaratnam purchased large blocks of Goldman shares, according to trading records shown during the trial.
A jury convicted Mr. Rajaratanam in May. On Wednesday, the government charged Mr. Gupta, 62, with passing tips to Mr. Rajaratnam about Goldman and Procter Gamble, where he also served as a director. Two of the five counts against Mr. Gupta, who is fighting the charges, relate to Mr. Rajaratnam’s Sept. 23 Goldman trades.
His day did not end with the Goldman meeting. Mr. Gupta spent the balance of the afternoon on his numerous nonprofit causes, including a meeting with Julian Schweitzer, the World Bank‘s head of health nutrition, and Raymond G. Chambers, the United Nations special envoy for malaria. He had a separate sit-down with Michel Katzatchkine, the director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to discuss a project to root out disease in Rwanda.
During those meetings, around 5 p.m., Goldman announced Mr. Buffett’s big investment to the public.
Mr. Gupta closed out the day with a dinner at Django, the now-defunct midtown Manhattan brasserie, in honor of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the health minister of Ethiopia. He then spent the night in a room at the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue, the calendar shows. His suite was booked by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity firm where, just that month, he had been named a senior adviser.
The next morning, prosecutors say, with Goldman’s shares opening higher, Mr. Rajaratnam sold his position in the bank, booking an illegal profit of about $840,000.
Rajat K. Gupta’s calendar for Sept. 23, 2008
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c606cb8aaf760ab144c0ac1b9f410ddb
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