Despite his best attempts to put off going to prison for as long as possible, former Goldman Sachs director and board member Rajat Gupta found out today he has less than three weeks left as a free man.
Gupta, who lost an appeal of his 2012 conviction on insider trading charges this past March, has been ordered to surrender to authorities and begin his two-year prison term on June 17. The businessman, who is also the former head of management consultancy McKinsey & Company, filed a motion earlier this month to delay the start of his sentence, but a panel of three U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals judges in New York issued an order Friday rejecting Gupta’s request to remain free on bail for a little while longer.
Gupta’s attorneys had hoped the judges would allow their client to stay out of prison pending further review of his case, but those hopes were dashed Friday.
The Gupta saga dates back to 2008, when he participated in a series of phone conversations with hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam in which Gupta passed along insider information he had learned as a Goldman board member to the Galleon Group founder. This included tipping Rajaratnam off just before Goldman announced its $5 billion investment in Berkshire Hathaway in September 2008, at the onset of the fiscal crisis.
Rajaratnam himself began serving an 11-year prison term – the longest-ever for insider trading – in 2011, while dozens of others have also been convicted or plead guilty in connection with the insider trading bust.
Gupta’s legal team has argued that the former Goldman director’s trial was improperly affected by a federal judge’s decision to allow government prosecutors to submit wiretap evidence against Gupta.