Rajat Gupta to be kept at home with ankle bracelet till March

India-born former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta — freed early after receiving credit for good behaviour — will stay confined to his apartment until March with an ankle bracelet that will monitor his movements. Convicted in 2012 on insider trading charges, the 67-year-old IIT and Harvard-educated former McKinsey partner began serving a two-year prison term in June, 2014.

He was freed from Federal Medical Centre Devens, a federal correctional facility in Ayer, Massachusetts, on January 5 to serve out the rest of the sentence at home after receiving credit for good behaviour, New York Times reported.

“Even though Gupta is no longer at Devens, he will remain a federal inmate until March 13, confined to his apartment and required to wear an ankle bracelet that monitors his movements,” the paper said. 

Joel Sickler, the founder of the Justice Advocacy Group, a company that advises inmates on prison stays, said that an inmate in good standing is eligible for home confinement for 10 per cent of a sentence, up to six months.

“Many white-collar inmates like Gupta argue for an early release so they can go back to work and pay off the mounting financial obligations they face in the form of fines and restitution,” the paper said.

Gupta last year applied to corrections officers for an early discharge from Devens. Under the rules governing home confinement, Gupta can go to work, visit a doctor’s office or attend religious services, Sickler said. “With permission, you can go shopping or get a haircut,” he said. In June 2012, a Manhattan jury found Gupta guilty of tipping Raj Rajaratnam, a onetime business associate and founder of a New York hedge fund known as the Galleon Group, to corporate secrets that he had gleaned in his position as a director of companies like Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble.

Since returning to his Manhattan apartment, Gupta has been fielding calls from former associates who say he is in good spirits and looks back on his spell in prison philosophically, the NYT said.

Gupta’s March 13 release date falls on a Sunday, so “they will release him on Friday,” the paper quoted Sickler as saying. “He will turn his bracelet in that Friday afternoon.” 

At the age of 45, Gupta became the first Indian CEO of the consulting giant McKinsey. He co-founded the prestigious Indian School of Business with fellow McKinsey executive Anil Kumar, who had pleaded guilty to insider trading and testified as a government witness against Gupta in his trial.

Gupta had filed several appeals, including to the US Supreme Court, to overturn his conviction and prison term but the courts rejected his arguments and affirmed his sentence. Earlier, in December less than three months before his two-year prison term to be ended, Rajat Gupta had lost bid to overturn his conviction on insider trading charges, with an appeals court in New York rejecting his legal challenge.

The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals had dismissed Gupta’s appeal in which he argued that there was insufficient evidence at trial to prove he had received personal benefits from now-jailed hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam in exchange for confidential board room information about Goldman Sachs.

Rajaratnam is serving an 11-year term in the same prison as Gupta. 67-year-old  Gupta had moved the court seeking a “certificate of appealability” but in the ruling the court “denied” the motion and “dismissed” his appeal.

“Appellant has not shown that ‘jurists of reason would find it debatable whether the district court was correct in its procedural ruling’ ...as to whether Appellant’s claim was procedurally defaulted,” Circuit Judges Susan Carney and Christopher Droney said in their ruling.