Why were Wall Street's Indian-American elite uprooted?
Why did Sri Lanka's richest man go to jail in the United States for 9 years?
Hello everyone, welcome to Chunyang Notes, today we tell the story of Sri Lanka's richest man in the United States and the involvement of a group of Indians.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > South Asian hometown association</h1>
The protagonist of the story is named Rajaratnam, who was born in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, and after graduating from high school, he ran to the United States to be gilded and got an MBA from Wharton.
Rajaratnam
Rajaratnam's first job was as a loan officer at JPMorgan Chase, where he lent loans to silicon valley businesses.
He was lucky enough to catch up with the explosion of Silicon Valley tech companies when he first entered the industry.
A large number of South Asian immigrants have entered Silicon Valley, and Indians, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, many of whom have become tech executives.
Raja's job is to deal with technology companies, and he has met a lot of South Asian code farmers in the first two years, and slowly pulled up a small circle of South Asians in Silicon Valley.
The South Asian circle can give Raja access to the profit data of many companies that have not yet been released, which is actually inside information.
For Silicon Valley's code farmers, inside information is of little value, but for Raja, who is engaged in finance, insider information is equivalent to wealth.
In order to cash in on his intelligence and contacts, Raja left JPMorgan Chase and in 1996, he set up his own hedge fund, sailing group.
With inside information, Raja's stock speculation is naturally invincible, and in just ten years, the Sailing Fund has mixed into the first echelon of Wall Street hedge funds.
But Raja's means are not visible after all, as the saying goes, he often walks by the river, which can not get his shoes wet, and Raja, who is thinking about insider trading, soon got into trouble.
At that time, Intel had an Indian named Rumi Khan, who would regularly send Raja the manufacturer orders and unit prices received by Intel, which allowed Raja to accurately calculate Intel's quarterly revenue.
Intel was frustrated to find that there was always someone in the market who could accurately predict their performance and then buy or sell stocks in advance.
In order to find out the inner ghost, Intel executives quietly installed monitors on the fax machines at the company's headquarters.
Soon after, Rumi Khan was caught sending handwritten messages and company secrets to Raja.
Intel executives were very annoyed, but the family ugliness could not be publicized, they just fired Lumi Khan, and did not pursue her legal responsibility.
However, although Intel is open,000, Raja is very unruly, and Rumi Khan has just been dismissed on the front foot and hired by the Sailing Group on the back foot.
This is completely faceless for Intel, and when he learned that Rumi Khan joined the Sailing Group, Intel directly reported the case.
Rumi Khan was arrested and chose to cooperate with the police, but due to insufficient evidence, Raja eventually escaped.
The sailing group nearly capsized, but Raja didn't learn his lesson.
As the size of the fund continues to expand, the intelligence obtained by small circles is no longer enough, and Raja must open up new sources of information.
In 2007, on the eve of the listing of the Sailing Group, Raja hosted a gala dinner at his mansion.
At the banquet, a graceful blonde became the focus of the audience.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > blue-eyed demon woman</h1>
Dressed as a "hot girl", the blonde, wearing a loose, revealing shirt and an orange-red short skirt, flew all over the scene like a flower butterfly.
Blue-eyed witch
This hot girl is Danielle Chelsea, the famous "blue-eyed witch" on Wall Street.
Chelsea was born in the south of New York, and has been a beautiful young woman since childhood, becoming a beauty pageant in New York at the age of 15.
After graduating from college, Chelsea joined a stockbroking firm.
The trading floor on Wall Street is full of male traders, and Chelsea likes to wear low-cut tops and short skirts to dangle in front of traders.
With its charm and sophisticated sensibility, Chelsea quickly captivated a world of Wall Street executives.
Chelsea often has easy access to information that no one else can get. With this skill, she became popular on Wall Street.
In 2007, Newcastle, a large $7 billion fund under management, hired Chelsea as the fund manager, and Newcastle offered Chelsea a super high salary.
When Raja meets the enchanted Chelsea at the dinner, his eyes light up.
Raja knew that Chelsea could take down greasy Wall Street executives, let alone a simple Silicon Valley code farmer.
Silicon Valley
Both Newcastle and the Sailing Group need inside information, and between the electric flint, Raja and Chelsea hit it off, and they have to join forces to dig into the corners of Silicon Valley.
Under Raja's recommendation, chelsea, which has a bold style, soon opened up the situation in Silicon Valley.
As soon as she went to a meeting at a technology company, the technical men who buried their heads in programming immediately smiled.
A Silicon Valley executive who once had contact with Chelsea recalled: Chelsea was often dressed in revealing clothes, drinking from one bar to another with a group of people, and her best trick was dancing in the bar, and the dance was full of teasing.
The code farmers were obsessed with her dancing style, and they also gave her a nickname: Wall Street Witch.
Many of Silicon Valley's tech elites have fallen under Chelsea's pomegranate skirt, and in the subsequent insider trading case with the largest number of people involved, the big guys who were dragged into the water by Chelsea include:
AMD Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Yizhi Lu, IBM Senior Vice President Moffat, and executives from a number of technology companies such as Intel, Google, Akamai, and PolyTon.
Chelsea and Raja had a great time working together, but she never dreamed that Raja would have been targeted by the FBI before she met her.
In early 2007, a year before Raja met Chelsea, the Sailing Group bought 400,000 shares of Hilton hotel stock without warning.
Just 2 days later, Hilton released good news, the stock price rose all the way, and the Sailing Group made a profit of more than $4 million.
Such a blatant Hilton wool soon attracted retaliation, and Hilton took the Sailing Group to court on suspicion of illegal trading.
But this time, the FBI, which received the report, did not act rashly.
They secretly investigate and quickly lock in the sailboat group fund manager who is handling the business.
The fund manager quickly pleaded guilty, but as in the last Intel incident, the FBI still couldn't find enough evidence to arrest Raja.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > eavesdropping</h1>
Before Raja's case, the FBI had never wireted a Wall Street executive. Telephone monitoring is a tactic used against the mafia.
But this time, in order to bring down Sri Lanka's richest man, the FBI moved out high-tech eavesdropping equipment to monitor Raja's phone 24 hours a day.
After several months of eavesdropping, at 11:04 on August 15, 2008, the FBI finally got Raja's incriminating evidence.
According to the charges released by the U.S. Department of Justice, the scene was like this.
Kuma, a director at McKinsey & Company, called Raja and said: "AMD will receive a $6 billion to $8 billion investment, which was finalized yesterday, and you'd better buy AMD stock sooner rather than later."
Kuma, an Indian, is a director of McKinsey and a senior consultant to AMD, and is trusted by AMD's top management.
Raja pulled Kuma into the water very early, and in order to facilitate the collection of money from Raja, Kuma also used his status as a maid to open an account overseas.
The transaction between HP and AMD in 2004 and the merger of ATI and AMD in 2006 were leaked to Raja in advance by Kuma, and with these two pieces of information, the Sailing Fund made tens of millions of dollars.
Raja was excited to hear that AMD had made another big move, and he asked Kuma: How has AMD performed in the latest quarter?
Kumar replied: "It's doing well, and AMD's stock price will definitely rise."
Putting down Kumar's phone, Raja made another call to Chelsea at 11:20 that day.
Raja's two phone calls revealed two of his internal lines, namely the South Asian circle and the blue-eyed demon woman.
Because Chelsea were playing with AMD chairman Lu Yizhi at this time, Raja asked Chelsea to confirm whether Kumar's message was accurate.
At 12:38, Raja dialed Chelsea again.
Chelsea confirmed that the inside information was accurate, but she warned Raja: "I have ten thousand reasons not to want to get into trouble, and if you buy too much and the target is too big, then this unusual deal will definitely poke out the big basket." ”
In the afternoon, Sailing Group bought 2.1 million shares of AMD stock, while Raja also bought some call options. Three days later, Sailing Group bought another 3.8 million shares.
In this way, Raja held a total of 6 million shares of AMD.
In the weeks that followed, Raja spoke several more times with Chelsea and Kumar.
Both sources said that in the first week of October, AMD's announcement would be released.
Raja and his informants are waiting to get rich, and the FBI is waiting to close the net. Just as insider trading was about to reach its final step, a dramatic scene occurred.
In September 2008, Lehman Brothers, one of the five largest investment banks in the United States, collapsed, and the subprime mortgage crisis swept the world.
Although AMD's performance is very good, and the news of obtaining investment is also announced as scheduled, the plunge in the US stock market still drags AMD down, and the 6 million shares of AMD held by the Sailing Group have experienced huge losses.
The FBI failed to catch Raja and the informant in dividing the loot, but months of recordings, combined with amd transactions, were enough to convict Raja.
In October 2008, Raja, Chelsea, Kumar and others were arrested for insider trading.
Because the Sailing Fund is the majority shareholder of many of Sri Lanka's top companies, the day Raja was arrested, the Sri Lankan stock market hit its biggest decline in more than four months.
Unaware that his phone had been monitored, Raja insisted that all the company's transactions were legal and compliant.
The FBI knew that Raja was an old fritter, and they directly played a recording of Raja's call with Chelsea, and Raja's face, which has always been eloquent, instantly turned from blue to white.
The recording of the phone became the strongest evidence, and Raja planted it.
Phase frying He is too anxious
The insider trading case, which involved the largest number of people and the largest amount of illegal transactions in U.S. history, was tried for three years, implicating many South Asian elites in Raja's circle.
The most famous of these is former McKinsey Managing Director Gu Leijie, who is regarded by countless Indian immigrants as a benchmark for struggle.
Gu Lei is an outstanding figure, and he is the first Indian to break the ceiling of promotion in the United States, and he was mcKinsey's number one for almost 10 years from 1994 to 2003.
In 2003, then-Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee awarded Gu the Lifetime Achievement Award.
The successive capsizing of Raja, Kuma and Gu Leijie has made the South Asians in the United States very faceless.
However, in the United States, the most energetic person in the South Asian search is also an Indian.
In that issue of The King of The Deal, we mention Pritt Bahala, who is the judge of the Southern District of New York.
Known as the "plague god of Wall Street," Bahara has prosecuted 100 Wall Street executives in his 10 years as a judge, and Raja and Gu Leijie are the two biggest big men he has brought down.
It is really a fellow countryman to see a fellow countryman, and he is too anxious to fry.
Well, the story of Sri Lanka's richest man is here, like our works, you can click to pay attention, the next issue of the story is more exciting.