How many people for the Galleon Group were arrested today charged in an insider-trading case?”
The founder of the Galleon Group, a big New York hedge fund, was charged on Friday with insider trading in the stocks of several companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Clearwire and Akamai, earning about $20 million in the process. Federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York accused Raj Rajaratnam, 51, with illegally obtaining and trading on information on these companies, which also included Polycom, Hilton Hotels, Google and People Support. He was charged with four counts of conspiracy and nine counts of securities fraud. (Read the complaints after the jump.) The prosecutors’ case is built on both statements from an unnamed cooperating witness, who has agreed to plead guilty, and from the recording of four conversations between the witness and Mr. Rajaratnam. The unnamed witness began conversations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2007, which led to the phone taps. At a press conference Friday afternoon, law enforcement officials described the case as a
Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam and five others have been arrested and charged in a $20 million insider-trading case, prosecutors said. At a press conference Friday, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced that Mr. Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group and portfolio manager for the Galleon Technology Funds, has been charged with four counts of conspiracy and eight counts of securities fraud. Galleon at one point had as much as $7 billion in assets under management. The company now has about $3.7 billion in assets under management. “This is not a garden variety insider-trading case,” Mr. Bharara said. “This case represents the largest hedge fund insider-trading case ever charged criminally.” Mr. Bharara also said he believed it was the first time that prosecutors had used a wiretap in an insider-trading case. Mr. Rajaratnam, 52 years old, was taken into custody at his home in New York by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shortly after 6 a.m. EDT on Friday. A lawyer
Rajaratnam, 52 years old, was taken into custody at his home in New York by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation shortly after 6 a.m. EDT on Friday. In court documents, prosecutors said Rajaratnam had expressed to another individual that he believed a former Galleon Group employee was wearing a wire and that Rajaratnam had purchased a plane ticket to fly to London on Friday from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. He had booked a return flight from Geneva on Oct. 22, prosecutors said. Others charged criminally in the case include Rajiv Goel, an Intel Corp. (INTC) employee involved in Intel’s investments; Anil Kumar, a director at global management-consulting firm McKinsey & Co.; Danielle Chiesi and Mark Kurland of New Castle Partners LLC, the one-time equity hedge-fund group at Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc.; and Robert Moffat, a senior vice president at International Business Machines Corp. (IBM).
