Rajat Gupta: A stunning fall from grace

Last week, federal prosecutors said Gupta had tried to make other people successful, illegally. Gupta, 62, a former director of Goldman Sachs, is accused of leaking corporate secrets about the bank to his friend Raj Rajaratnam, the head of the Galleon Group hedge fund. Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison this month for orchestrating a huge insider trading conspiracy.

Gupta lawyer Gary P Naftalis has denied the government’s accusations, saying, “Gupta is innocent of any of these charges. He has always acted with honesty and integrity.

Regardless of the case’s outcome, the charges punctuate a stunning fall from grace for Gupta, whose personal story reads like a caricature of a Horatio Alger tale.

Orphaned at 18, Gupta, a native of Kolkata, received an engineering degree from the elite Indian Institute of Technology. He earned a scholarship to Harvard Business School, graduating at the top of his class and securing a prized posting at McKinsey & Co, the dispenser of corporate wisdom to many of the Fortune 500.

He rose rapidly at the consulting firm, making his mark running its Scandinavian office, once considered a backwater at the firm. He expanded McKinsey’s presence in that region and became known for his low-key, dignified manner.

Most young consultants use McKinsey as a breeding ground for careers in corporate America. The firm counts among its alumni Morgan Stanley chief executive James P Gorman and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

But Gupta became a McKinsey lifer, taking on more and more responsibility until 1994, when, at the age of 45, his partners elected him to run the firm. His election - he was the first executive for was not born in the US to run McKinsey - was seen as a sea change for the hidebound organisation.

“I know consensus says McKinsey is white and traditional, but I am testimony to the fact that image isn’t true,” Gupta said in a 1994 profile in The Chicago Tribune. “If anything, it’s a meritocracy.”

Under his tenure, McKinsey expanded its global reach, aggressively moving into emerging markets like India and China. While he oversaw an era of growth at the consulting firm, his reign was not without controversy.

Gupta and some of his partners got caught up in the euphoria of the dot-com boom. One former executive, who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss his former firm, said that during that time, McKinsey strayed from its core big-company consulting work and began helping dot-coms cut deals and develop their businesses. “It was pigging out,” said this executive. “The work was there, and the young people wanted to do it.”

The firm was also an architect of Enron’s push from a sleepy energy pipeline company into the high-risk trading operation that led to the company’s 2001 collapse amid an accounting scandal. Jeffrey Skilling, Enron’s former chief executive, was a McKinsey alumnus.

The firm suffered, and in the wake of the technology and telecom bust during the early part of the last decade, McKinsey found itself with too many employees and not enough business. When he stepped down from McKinsey in 2003, Gupta used the reputation - and peerless Rolodex - that he had built at the firm. Former United Nations Secretary General Kofi A Annan appointed him to advise the international organisation on management reform. The Rockefeller Foundation named him a trustee. Some of America’s top companies recruited him for their boards, including Procter & Gamble, the consumer products giant; AMR, the parent of American Airlines; and Goldman Sachs.

“Over his 32-year career, Rajat Gupta has been a valued source of counsel to institutions, governments and business leaders around the world,” Goldman chief executive Lloyd C Blankfein said in a November 2006 statement announcing Gupta’s election to the board. “Our shareholders will be fortunate to have his strategic and operational expertise and judgment.”

Gupta’s directorship at Goldman was part of his aggressive push away from management consulting and into the more lucrative arena of Wall Street. In 2007, he started a private equity firm, New Silk Route, that focused on Indian investments. One of his original partners on the New Silk Route deal was Rajaratnam. A Sri Lankan native, Rajaratnam met Gupta through their philanthropic work. The two men, both pillars of New York’s South Asian immigrant business community, became fast friends.

Gupta had a number of hedge fund and private equity investments, including several with Rajaratnam’s Galleon firm. Around that time, Gupta was weighing a position at the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. On a taped call played during Rajaratnam’s trial, Rajaratnam and a friend gossiped about what they saw as the materialistic ambitions of Gupta, who lives with his wife in Westport, Connecticut, a home once owned by the retail magnate J C Penney. “Here he sees an opportunity to make a hundred million dollars over the next five years, or 10 years, without doing a lot of work,” Rajaratnam said.

His foray into Wall Street could not have been more ill timed. The first cracks in the global economy surfaced just as he started New Silk Route, and his Galleon investments struggled as the stock market swooned. He ultimately lost his entire $10 million investment in a special Galleon-related vehicle set up for Gupta and a third partner. On July 29, 2008, with the financial crisis entering its most serious phase, Gupta called Rajaratnam.

The conversation, secretly recorded by FBI agents, was played during Rajaratnam’s trial.

On the call, Rajaratnam asked Gupta about a rumour that Goldman might look to buy a commercial bank. “This was a big discussion at a board meeting,” said Gupta, who then told Rajaratnam that Goldman was weighing a purchase of Wachovia and the American International Group.

The charges do not include the contents of that telephone call because there appears to be no evidence Rajaratnam traded on the tip.

Instead, the government’s case is based on more circumstantial evidence - phone bills and trading records that the government says show that Gupta leaked other secret Goldman board discussions to Rajaratnam, and that Rajaratnam traded on those, gaining several million dollars.

During its closing argument in the Rajaratnam trial, the government effectively previewed its case against Gupta. “You don’t get on the board of Goldman Sachs without having accomplished a lot in your life and having a great reputation,” said prosecutor Reed Brodsky. “But having a great reputation doesn’t give you a free pass to violate the law.

Nobody is above the law, no matter how good their reputation is.”

Gupta spoke to the issue of reputation in his speech last year to the Indian business school graduates. He urged the students to have a set of values that guide them. “Don’t take the shortcut,” he said. “Have your sense of values, your compass, and follow that.”