It seems like a courtroom drama made for Bollywood: The Sri Lankan hedge-fund kingpin being prosecuted by a fellow immigrant, the Indian-born U.S. attorney for Manhattan, says a note doing the rounds now in United States. It says:
“But the case against Raj Rajaratnam is very much an American story. Mr. Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of the Galleon Group, and Preet Bharara -- the Indian-born, Ivy League prosecutor -- are both South Asian, a term that actually gained popularity (and possibility) overseas to refer to the collective people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, among others. The relatively small immigrant group has formed a power elite in the US, from positions in corporate boardrooms to the governor's mansion.
An estimated 2.5 million Indians live in the US, less than 1% of the total population. Yet their median income is a whopping 80% higher than the average American. And in recent years, South Asians have found disproportionate success in technology and financial services, businesses at the core of the insider-trading allegations unveiled last week.
“Authorities say Mr. Rajaratnam conspired with Intel Capital employee Rajiv Goel and Anil Kumar, a director of McKinsey & Co. global management-consulting firm, between 2006 and 2008. All three received M.B.A.'s from the Wharton School. All have denied wrongdoing.
Unlike earlier generations of immigrants, the 1965 law opening US borders abandoned a quota system and attracted the brightest and best-educated foreigners. That allowed South Asians particularly to penetrate and dominate highly-skilled professions, said Ravi Batra, a prominent Indian-American lawyer in New York City.
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| Raj Rajaratnam |
Preet Bharara |
Mr. Rajaratnam studied engineering at the University of Sussex in England and graduated from Wharton in 1983.
The prosecutor in the case, Mr. Bharara, earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia Law School. He was born in Ferozepur, India, and arrived in the US as an infant.
Honoured by the North American South Asian Bar Association in 2007, Mr. Bharara invoked his heritage and those of his fellow desi lawyers.
“In the insider-trading scandal, Mr. Bharara "has to walk as fine a line as there is," said Sonjui L. Kumar, president of the bar association. "White prosecutors arrest people all the time, but here you have this financial mogul who happens to be South Asian and then you have a South Asian attorney. That's just where we are. It's a testament of where we've come as a community."
Such prominent South Asians include PepsiCo Inc. Chief Executive Indra Nooyi, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Silicon Valley financier Vinod Khosla.
A boom in high-technology and financial services helped lure South Asians from medicine and engineering into consulting and investment banking. Others turned entrepreneurial; one Duke University study found that more than a quarter of all tech start-ups in the US between 1995 and 2005 were initiated by immigrants.
For some immigrants, the attraction to hedge funds was logical. Jobs were competitive and lucrative, yet favoured the mathematically minded. Compared to the cosy world of investment banking, some South Asians might have found hedge funds to be more of a meritocracy, according to observers.
Some Indians fear resentment springing from the emerging scandal. "A level of success invites a level of scrutiny, that is always a natural consequence of success," said Rajiv Khanna, president of the India-America Chamber of Commerce. "It's not good publicity for the Indian businessman, but does [Bernard] Madoff define all the Jewish businessmen?"
"All it shows that Indians are coming of age," he said. "We have our bad apples too."
Insider quotes
Among the scandal's most colourful quotes and anecdotes:
Galleon founder Raj Rajaratnam once "paid four million dollars to have Kenny Rogers come to a birthday party at his house and sing his favourite song, 'The Gambler,' over and over again. Kenny refused to go on after a dozen times."
Anyone who arrived late at Galleon's morning meeting of 70 analysts, portfolio managers and traders was fined US $ 25. |
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