Major Obama donor Rajat Gupta has been convicted of insider trading

Rajat K. Gupta, the retired head of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and a former Goldman Sachs board member, has been found guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud. He is the most prominent business executive convicted in a wave of prosecutions that followed the government’s sweeping investigation into insider trading on Wall Street. After a month long trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, a jury took only two days to deliberate before reaching a verdict. It found Gupta guilty of leaking confidential information about Goldman to his former friend and business associate, the fallen hedge fund titan Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan native, on three different occasions in 2008. He was also convicted of conspiring in an insider trading scheme with Rajaratnam. Gupta faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, but will probably serve less time than that. Rajaratnam, the former head of the Galleon Group hedge fund who was convicted of orchestrating a huge insider trading conspiracy, is serving an 11-year jail term. The criminal charges against Gupta stunned the global business world. Gupta, a native of Kolkata, India, was orphaned as a teenager. After earning an engineering degree, he moved to the United States after receiving a scholarship to Harvard Business School. He then landed a job at McKinsey, the elite management-consulting firm. In 1994, at age of 45, Gupta was elected the global head of McKinsey, the first non-American-born executive to run the firm.