Feted business guru turned convicted felon - The spectacular rise and fall of the former McKinsey & Co. MD, and former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director

Rajat Gupta in his memoir, "Mind Without Fear," that released Monday, tells of his dramatic rise to the top of the corporate and financial world in America and then his fall after being charged in 2012, in one of the largest insider trading cases in the US.

The memoir comes just months after a federal appeals court declined to throw out Gupta’s 2012 conviction. Gupta had argued that U.S. prosecutors failed to prove he got a personal benefit for passing tips to his friend, billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.

In 2012, Gupta was found guilty of passing confidential boardroom information to the hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, who is currently serving 11 years in prison for insider trading. One such information the prosecutors alleged Gupta shared with Rajaratnam in September 2008 was about Berkshire Hathaway’s five billion dollar investment in Goldman Sachs. While Gupta has already served his prison term, a ruling in his favor would have cleared his record.

"Regret not testifying at my trial"

The former director of Goldman Sachs said he had been telling his lawyers to prepare him to testify in court and he had been preparing himself for it. He, however, said that his lawyers advised him throughout the case that he should not take the stand in the courtroom. "They kept saying don’t testify, don’t testify. It was a bad call on my part. I always regret it (not testifying in court)," he said adding that it was a very difficult circumstance for him since he did not know anything about the legal system.

"Here were my lawyers, my advisers who are supposed to be in my interest. Right? They kept saying don’t testify," he said.

Gupta said throughout his life as a consultant, he has given advice to his clients and they listened to him.

"The situation was reversed. I was the client. So, in the end, I succumbed to their arguments. I felt it was a moment of weakness. I feel very badly about it that I didn’t testify," he said.

“In the end, the prosecutor told a good story -- not a true story, but a believable one, given the climate of the time,” Gupta said. “And in my silence, I did not offer a better story.”

In ‘Mind Without Fear,’ he’s finally able to write his own.

‘Zero-Sum-Game’

Distrust about the financial sector is a thread that runs through Gupta’s memoir and parallels to his belief in the ideals of McKinsey, which he joined at 24 and retired from three-and-a-half decades later. “The financial industry is a little of a zero-sum game, and they are much more skilled at trying to figure out how to protect their own interest,” Gupta said. “At McKinsey, you learn about client interest and you don’t think ‘I have to protect myself.’”

Gupta concedes his wife is probably right in saying he romanticizes the firm. But, this was the scene of some of his greatest victories -- where the orphaned son of a socialist freedom fighter from India rose through the ranks to become, he says, “the first Indian to ever lead a global company of McKinsey’s stature.”

He had achieved the quintessential American dream until it unraveled. As his wife very aptly said, “You’re too trusting and you think everyone will be nice to you. Financial people are different than consultants. They’ll eat you for lunch!”

Sources: Scroll.in, Livemint, Bloomberg