A palpable shockwave swept through the Indian and international-corporate world after Rajat Gupta, the India-born former head of McKinsey & Co, was convicted for one of the largest insider trading scandal in US history in June 2012. Fallen Angel: The Making and Unmaking of Rajat Gupta by Sandipan Deb, an IITian and IIM graduate and a veteran journalist, brings the events, personalities and drama surrounding the securities fraud.
Many of the central figures like Rajat Gupta, Anil Kumar and their friends are not new to Deb, thanks to his earlier book, The IITians: The Story of an Extraordinary Indian Institution and How Its Alumni Are Reshaping the World. With deep understanding of business and the corporate world, the author who is the former managing editor of Outlook, ex-editor of the Financial Express, and founder-editor of Open till a few months back, has narrated the story of the Fallen Angel in a manner that is easy to comprehend.
It also goes to Deb’s credit that he has produced a crisply written, well-researched book without visiting the courtooms and boardrooms in United States where the drama unfolded with details ferreted out from transcripts of FBI-wiretap conversations and stories put out by global media platforms.
Who was Rajat Gupta? Why did the story grip the US and India and leaders across the globe? Deb answers these questions and more. For those of us who are uninitiated, Rajat Gupta’s life and career is well sketched. In the chapter titled The Karmayogi, Deb writes: “RAJAT GUPTA’S LIFE IS AN ASTONISHING SAGA OF OVERCOMING towering odds through a near superhuman combination of intelligence, hard work, discipline, equanimity and humility.” With such embellishments, the author, a proud IITian, traces Gupta’s life and his struggle and how he managed to reach dizzying heights in the US corporte sector.
Yet, the author, being an objective journalist, does not take sides. “Rajat Gupta… was the man I had found most difficult to fathom… Either he was the perfect guy – highly intelligent, unfailingly courteous, never a hair out of place – or he had built an impregnable wall around himself. I could not get the slightest glimpse of what could lie behind it…”
However, Gupta’s friends tried hard to save him. Their perceptions of him are chronicled in a website called www.friendsofrajat.com and include Mukesh Ambani and Adi Godrej, among others.
Deb has also drawn sketches of other dramatis persone like Raj Rajaratnam, the richest Sri Lankan-born individual with $1.8 billion, who used, misused and abused people like Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar, another Mcseyite, who were tricked into giving inside information about their upcoming deals. Also the book traces Preet Bharara, the India-born US attorney for the southern district of New York who led the hunt down in the case, and the Gandhian judge, Justice Jed S Rakoff.
What got Rajat Gupta into trouble was inside information he obtained in his capacity as a member of the Goldman Sachs board and the P&G Board and is alleged to have passed on to Rajaratnam. Though Gupta did not make monetary gains for allegdly passing the insider information to Galleon that benefitted in million of dollars, what nailed him was the single phone conversation between him and Rajaratnam on 29 July 2008. Though Gupta’s defence lawyer considered it to be circumstantial evidence, the judge considered it to be overwhelming.
Gupta was sentenced to 24 months of imprisonment while his colleague Kumar got away almost scot free with two years on probation and a paltry $25,000 fine for turning an approver and helping the law enforcement agencies crack the case.
But what reamins to be answered is why did Rajat Gupta fall prey to the devious machinations of Rajaratnam? The career of Rajaratnam, as Deb points out, amply demonstrates that he has “an instinct for identifying the corruptability potential in a man”.
It is hard to believe that a man as brilliant as Rajat Gupta, one who was among most sought after global leaders, would not have known Rajaratnam and his ways and fell prey like a lamb.
Describing the Rajat Gupta case as ‘a great and immeasurably humbling tragedy’, Deb wonders, “After a lifetime of upright and courageous honesty , did he actually feel the world had not rewarded him enough? Did he really, as Rajaratnam thought, want to join the billionaires’s club? Or was he the unluckiest man in the world?”
Though the verdict is out, answers to the above question and more would remain shrouded till Gupta chooses to speak out or write about it when he is a free man again. Till such a time, we have to do with Deb’s book.
Author: Sandipan Deb
Publications: Rupa
Edition: Paperback
ISBN: 978-81-291-2111-0
Pages: 242
Price: Rs 295
