Raj Rajaratnam’s first interview

24 October 2011 02:17 pm

Hedge-fund executive Raj Rajaratnam, recently sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading, gave a rare interview to Newsweek magazine. It’s a bizarre read.

Rajaratnam vacillates between being angry at people he believed turned against him, and expressing pride at being one of the few South Asian investors to succeed on Wall Street. (Rajaratnam is originally from Sri Lanka.) “I saw myself as an underdog,” Rajaratnam told Newsweek.

In the interview, Rajaratnam also says repeatedly that he felt discriminated against in the course of the government’s investigation into insider trading. He told Newsweek:

“There are two types of plea bargains. One is, you cooperate with the government. You finger 10 other people. The other is a plea bargain without cooperation.” The white defendants all pleaded without cooperating; they did not wear a wire. “The South Asians all did the plea bargain with fingering,” he notes sourly. (The Wall Street Journal)


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