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Charges added in Rajaratnam insider trading case...
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Additional criminal charges were filed on
Tuesday against Galleon hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam as prosecutors alleged
he and his co-defendant reaped $49 million from illegal insider trading, up from
an earlier claim of $40 million.
In the parallel civil case against Rajaratnam and co-defendant Danielle Chiesi,
a judge ordered the two defendants to turn over wiretaps to the U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission. In a letter to Manhattan federal court Judge Jed Rakoff
on Tuesday night, Rajaratnam's lawyers asked him to stay the order pending an
appeal.
Thousands of wiretaps were made in the criminal probe between 2003 and 2009
involving Wall Street and Silicon Valley firms that was announced last October,
but lawyers for the defendants and the SEC have been tussling over their use in
the parallel civil fraud case.
Rajaratnam, 52, and Chiesi, 44, a former employee of New Castle Funds LLC, were
arrested last October and indicted in December on charges of securities fraud
and conspiracy in what prosecutors have described as the biggest hedge fund
insider trading case in the United States.
The new indictment adds two more counts of securities fraud against Rajaratnam.
In a letter to the court on Tuesday, his lawyers said they would ask the judge
presiding the criminal case to order a separate trial from Chiesi.
The indictment alleges that Rajaratnam made a total of $45 million and Chiesi $4
million in a wide-ranging scheme that also led to charges against a score of
other traders, lawyers or fund managers. Rajaratnam and Chiesi face possible
prison sentences of up to 20 years if convicted.
They pleaded not guilty to the original indictment. The next hearing is
scheduled for February 11.
"Mr. Rajaratnam is innocent and looks forward to his day in court when a jury of
his fellow citizens will examine and evaluate all of the evidence," his lawyer,
John Dowd, said in a statement.
Chiesi's lawyer Alan Kaufman said the superseding indictment "has nothing new
with regard to the allegations against my client."
Separately on Tuesday, Rakoff ruled that Rajaratnam and Chiesi, who are fighting
to keep the wiretap evidence out of both criminal and civil cases, must provide
the SEC with recordings they received from criminal prosecutors by February 15.
"The notion that only one party to a litigation should have access to some of
the most important non-privileged evidence bearing directly on the case runs
counter to basic principles of civil discovery in an adversary system," Rakoff's
written order said.
While the SEC and criminal prosecutors often coordinate with each other, there
are limits under the law on the information they can share in parallel civil and
criminal cases, which is why the defense was ordered to provide the material and
not the prosecutors.
"We are obviously disappointed and respectfully disagree with the ruling,"
Chiesi's lawyer Kaufman said.
In the wider insider trading probe, 21 people have been criminally or civilly
charged. Nine have pleaded guilty. Eight of those are cooperating with the
government's investigation, including two longtime friends of Rajaratnam, former
McKinsey & Co executive Anil Kumar and Rajiv Goel, a former director of the
treasury group at Intel Capital, the investment arm of Inel Corp.
"Rajaratnam, Chiesi and others repeatedly traded on material, nonpublic
information pertaining to upcoming earnings forecasts, mergers, acquisitions, or
other business combinations," the office of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney said in
a statement on Tuesday.
It said the superseding indictment charges trading based on inside information
in Intel Corp, International Business Machines Corp, Akamai Technologies Inc,
Polycom Inc, Hilton Hotels Corp, Google Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, Clearwire
Corp, Advanced Micro Devices, ATI Technologies Inc and eBay Inc Inc.
The cases are USA v Raj Rajaratnam and Danielle Chiesi, U.S. District Court for
the Southern District of New York, No. 09-01184 and SEC v Galleon Management LP
et al 09-cv-08811.
(Reporting by Grant McCool and Jonathan Stempel; editing by Gary Hill)
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Lawyers in Lancaster Gate
No one is above the law
By Harry Phibbs
Three Labour MPs facing prosecution for expenses fraud are claiming that
their Parliamentary status gives them some sort of immunity. But as the
eighteenth century lawyer Sir Thomas Fuller declared: ‘Be you never so
high, the law is above you.’
As Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning
quoted this in a case involving a trade union breaking the law and a
Labour Government Minister claiming it was up to the Government when to
enforce the law.
Lord Denning said: ‘When the Attorney General comes and tells us that he
has a prerogative by which he alone can say whether the criminal law can
be enforced in these courts or not – then I say he has no such
prerogative. He has no prerogative to suspend or dispense with the laws of
England. If he does not give his consent, then any citizen of the land -
any one of the public who is adversely affected - can come to this court
and ask that the law be enforced.’
There have been cases of governments putting a particular group above the
general law when convenient – and the immunities for the trade unions are
a notorious example. NHS hospitals used to have crown immunity from food
hygiene laws. It was estimated that 60 per cent of hospital kitchens
breached the food health regulations - had they been applied to them.
Then, of course, we have the arrangements that politicians make for
themselves – taking things to another level.
MPs are exempt from the law of defamation when they are speaking in the
chamber of the House of Commons – and I can see the case for that. It is a
principle that goes right back to the 1689 Bill of Rights and it has stood
us in good stead, protecting the House of Commons as a special place where
free speech and independent law making could safely take place.
But the purported legal dodge by the accused MPs of using this Act of
Parliament is grotesque.
This law has used down the centuries to safeguard our liberties. Now the
MPs facing criminal charges for fiddling their expenses feel they should
be able to claim Parliamentary privilege. They are saying that prosecuting
them for fraud or theft would be to interfere in the workings of
Parliament. They are claiming to have done nothing wrong.
Of course they are innocent until proven guilty. But if they have done
nothing wrong why should they be afraid of being judged on the same legal
basis as the rest of us?
Lawyers note that applying the law on Parliamentary privilege in this area
hasn't been tested before and they are looking forward to an interesting
test case. The rest of us are outraged that there should any possibility
of such an abuse being tolerated.
The Tory leader David Cameron has called for a Parliamentary Privilege
Bill to clarify the law, to put the matter beyond doubt. In fact a joint
committee on Parliamentary privilege, chaired by the Labour MP Tony
Wright, proposed legislation on this in 1999, but the Government has done
nothing. Clarity is badly needed in this area.
Don’t forget that Parliamentary privilege was not sufficient to protect
the Conservative MP Damian Green from having his Commons office searched
by police without a warrant. His computer was seized as part of a Home
Office leak inquiry after he exposed the scale of illegal immigration.
MPs should of course be protected from state harassment in getting on with
their jobs. But this does not mean they should be above the law.
The cross party recommendations from 1999 were clear and sensible in
making this distinction - very much in the spirit of the 1689 Act but
looking at how that applied to the modern work of an MP.
The Government has delayed implementing the recommendations for over 10
years and they are now long overdue. Confidence in our parliamentary
democracy is at rock bottom.
A new report from the Law Commission has outlined a series of proposals to
change the law as it affects cohabitants’ property and finances when their
relationships end, whether by separation or by death. It is for the
Government to decide whether it accepts the recommendations and, if so,
when it will introduce legislation into Parliament to implement them.
Employment Law
Since the Age Regulations came into effect in 2006, there has been an
increasing volume of age discrimination claims made in the Employment
Tribunals: the latest figures available showed 2,949 claims for the year
to end March 2008. By way of comparison, claims on grounds of disability
discrimination ran at about twice this level over the same period, but age
claims were more than twice the total of claims on grounds of religion or
belief and sexual orientation together.
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intended to supplement or comprise any precise facts, although we have
researched sufficiently for the facts and information to be reasonably
accurate. All content and materials including research papers,
case studies and testimonials summarizing facts have been done by
individuals working for this website. We cannot be held responsible for
any inaccuracies, as we have described that information is for educational
purposes and therefore maybe a few weeks old.
