Wednesday, 27 July 2016
Last updated 12 hours ago
Dec 18 2012 | 11:05am ET
Convicted Raj Rajaratnam tipster Rajat Gupta isn't only fighting to avoid prison time—he's fighting to avoid paying Goldman Sachs, on the board of which he served and about which he was found guilty of passing tips to the Galleon Group founder.
Gupta, the former head of McKinsey & Co., formally objected to Goldman's demand that he pay almost $6.78 million to the bank. In a court filing Friday, Gupta said that Goldman failed to justify the request, seeking more than $3 million in legal fees from before a criminal probe, which ended with Gupta's conviction in June, began in earnest.
Gupta was sentenced in October to two years in prison but remains free pending an appeal.
At the time of the sentencing, Goldman asked a judge to order Gupta to pay $6.78 million, covering legal fees it said it incurred during the Gupta probe, as well as a quarter of Gupta's compensation for his time on Goldman's board. The judge ordered the bank to produce its billing records.
Those records are a mess, Gupta's lawyer suggested, not broken down into categories or into recoverable and non-recoverable fees. They also argued that most of the legal fees were incurred before the end of Rajaratnam's trial in May of last year.
"Simply stated, Goldman is entitled to restitution of only those fees it can demonstrate were necessarily incurred in connection with specific requests by the government," Gupta's lawyer wrote.