Raj Rajaratnam

Raj Rajaratnam founded the Galleon Group in 1997 and built it into one of the largest technology-focused hedge funds, managing over $7 billion. In 2009, he was arrested in one of the largest insider trading cases in US history. The government used wiretaps to record his conversations receiving tips from corporate insiders including McKinsey director Rajat Gupta and Intel executive Anil Kumar. Convicted in 2011, he received an 11-year prison sentence. The Galleon case significantly reshaped SEC enforcement tactics and deterred insider trading networks on Wall Street. The use of wiretaps — a law enforcement technique typically associated with organized crime investigations — in the Galleon case represented a fundamental shift in how US securities regulators approached hedge fund insider trading enforcement, signaling that the era of relatively informal information-sharing networks in financial markets was facing serious legal exposure.