BEAR MARKET: 2/4: Mysteries of the Early 21st Century Bull Market: 2/4: Uneven Justice: The Plot to Sink Galleon, by Raj Rajaratnam
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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BEAR MARKET: 2/4: Mysteries of the Early 21st Century Bull Market: 2/4: Uneven Justice: The Plot to Sink Galleon, by Raj Rajaratnam
https://www.amazon.com/Uneven-Justice-Plot-Sink-Galleon/dp/1637582811/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Raj Rajaratnam, the respected founder of the iconic hedge fund Galleon Group, which managed $7 billion and employed 180 people in its heyday, chose to go to trial rather than concede to a false narrative concocted by ambitious prosecutors looking for a scapegoat for the 2008 financial crisis. Naively, perhaps, Rajaratnam had expected to get a fair hearing in court. As an immigrant who had achieved tremendous success in his adopted country, he trusted the system. He had not anticipated prosecutorial overreach—inspired by political ambition—FBI fabrications, judicial compliance, and lies told under oath by cooperating witnesses. In the end, Rajaratnam was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison. He served seven and a half.
Meanwhile, not a single senior bank executive responsible for the financial crisis was even charged.
Uneven Justice is the story of his bewildering and confounding prosecution by forces who, quite frankly, were looking for bigger game. When Rajaratnam refused to support the narrative that would make that happen, he and the Galleon Group became collateral damage.
A cautionary tale with implications for us all, Uneven Justice is both a riveting page-turner and an eye-opening lesson in the vagaries of justice when an unscrupulous prosecutor is calling the shots.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Batch for speaking with the author, Raj Raj Ratnam. |
| 0:10.4 | uneven justice is the book. The plot to sink galley and this is autobiography. Raj tells |
| 0:16.0 | us early in the book that he wrote this while in federal prison. He wrote it sometimes |
| 0:21.8 | at first an hour a day, sometimes two hours, sometimes three hours. It reads extremely |
| 0:27.5 | well. It's upsetting. It's like you're trapped in a commose story. You can't get out. You |
| 0:32.5 | know that bad things are ahead and you can't believe they don't turn it off at this point. |
| 0:37.4 | So let's go back to something that I think is pertinent to the story, which is that Raj |
| 0:43.5 | is born in what he describes as the paradox of Sri Lanka. How did you get from Sri |
| 0:49.5 | Lanka to a Wall Street Raj? I know you got to the Wharton School, but in between Sri |
| 0:56.3 | Lanka and the Wharton School, where did you go to school? How did you go up? I did my |
| 1:03.3 | early schooling in Sri Lanka and then I went to boarding school at the age of Lebanon in India |
| 1:10.9 | and then on to England. I said, I can't believe that the British education is the most |
| 1:17.0 | rigorous education. We were a colony of the British and so I went to boarding school in |
| 1:26.0 | Britain. I did my undergraduate at Sussex University in engineering. Once I completed my degree, |
| 1:34.0 | I came to the United States to go to the Wharton School. I was interested in finance and I thought |
| 1:40.9 | the ideal job for me was one that would combine my engineering background and my finance background. |
| 1:49.2 | You were a Chase in 1983. You were at Needham in 1985 and you rose in that firm to be |
| 1:55.0 | president at the age of 35. What was Needham at the time, Raj? Needham was an investment banking firm |
| 2:02.8 | focused on the technology, consumer and healthcare sectors. I started at Needham as a technology |
| 2:10.5 | analyst where I was able to combine my love of engineering and my love of finance. I started |
| 2:19.3 | as a semiconductor analyst and in 1985 and that was the time when the PC was taking off and the |
| 2:29.4 | guts or the building block of a PC was semiconductors and so my analysis was fun and I was at the |
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