http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2011/10/13/2011-10-13_hedgefund_exbillionaire_raj_rajaratnam_sentenced_to_11_years_in_prison_in_inside.html
Hedge-fund ex-billionaire Raj Rajaratnam sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider-trading scheme
BY Scott Shifrel
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, October 13th 2011, 12:29 PM
Hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam was in court Thursday to hear his sentence.
Emmanuel Dunand/Getty
Hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam was in court Thursday to hear his sentence.
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The hedge fund kingpin who pulled the strings in the largest insider trading scheme in a generation was sentenced Thursday to 11 years in prison - well shy of the stint prosecutors wanted.
Rajakurmara (Raj) Rajaratnam, 54, the founder of the Galleon Group, was described by a prosecutor as "the modern face of illegal insider trading," a business titan caught on wiretaps gloating over valuable insider tips.
Prosecutors wanted Rajaratnam, a Sri Lanka-born one-time billionaire, to waste away in prison for as many as 24 years.
Federal District Judge Richard Holwell said the financial bigwig's greedy plot was symptomatic of a "virus" that currently infects the financial industry - but in the end he opted to impose a more lenient sentence, in part because of Rajaratnam's ill health.
"His crimes and the scope of his crimes reflect a virus in our business culture that needs to be eradicated," Holwell said before a packed courtroom in lower Manhattan.
"When the integrity of the marketplace is called into question, the public suffers."
Yet Holwell distinguished between insider trading and the financial crimes of those like ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff, who ripped off hundreds of innocents and kept the money for himself and his family, lying through his teeth through it all.
The government's investigation of Rajaratnam centered on the most far-reaching use of wiretaps in any probe of white-collar wrongdoing.
His arrest was announced in Oct. 2009, and more than two dozen others took the fall along with him. Prosecutors convicted them all, getting sentences of anywhere from a few months to a decade.
But while the government said Rajaratnam was at the head of the conspiracy, his sentence topped by only one year that doled out to a fellow partner in greed just weeks ago.
Prosecutors said Rajaratnam is one of Wall Street's greatest villains. Assistant U.S. Attorney Reed Brodsky said the hefty, white-shoed crook "repeatedly, insistently and knowingly violated the laws of the United States."
"He is arguably the most egregious inside trader who faces sentencing in a courthouse in the United States," Brodsky said.
"His considerable fortune was built on a clandestine network of corruption and concealment," added New York FBI assistant director in charge Janice K. Fedarcyk.
The vast majority of the money he pulled in went to Galleon investors, and his defense lawyers even made the case that much of the insider trading resulted in losses.
In imposing sentence, Holwell took into consideration Rajaratnam's declining health: his advanced diabetes will lead to "imminent kidney failure," and the need for a transplant. The judge also took into account the millions that Rajaratnam has given to victims of earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural
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