Pundaknadu News 16 - Singporeans Know Thy Rich Indian FT Thumbis

In the Gupta case, Bharara's prosecution team charged and proved to the satisfaction of the jury that he passed on information about Goldman Sachs and P&G to Sri Lankan-origin businessman Raj Rajaratnam before they were publicly announced, enabling the latter's Galleon Funds to make multi-million dollar profits and avoid losses. Several other corporate managers of Indian-origin were involved in the case and received lighter sentences in exchange for testimony. Before Bharara's crusade against such actions, known as insider trading, white collar crimes of this kind were rarely punished, particularly when they involved well-connected elites. But Bharara, a Ferozepur, Punjab- born immigrant who was chosen by Obama to be the Manhattan prosecutorial watchdog, has ripped into this cozy Wall Street arrangement, often using controversial methods such as wiretaps and informants.

In the Gupta case, Bharara's team, using phone records and trading sequences, showed that Rajat Gupta placed a call to Raj Rajaratnam within a minute after disconnecting from a conference call in which the Goldman Sachs board (of which Gupta was member) approved billionaire investor Warren Buffett's $5 billion investment in the firm towards the close of market on September 23, 2008. Gupta and Rajaratnam spoke for 30 seconds. With minutes to go before the market closed, Rajratnam ordered his traders to buy shares of Goldman, making a neat profit for $1.2 million.

That phone call will now send Gupta to prison, where Rajaratnam is already cooling his heels after an 11-year sentence last October.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...faces-25-yrs-in-jail/articleshow/14161025.cms

From Bloomberg:

If no changes are made to Pandit’s compensation package, Citigroup will have paid him about $261 million in the five years since he became CEO, including his personal compensation and about $165 million for buying his Old Lane Partners LP hedge fund in 2007 in a deal that led to his becoming CEO. The bank shut Old Lane soon after Pandit took the post, causing a $202 million writedown.
http://www.businessinsider.com/vikram-pandit-compensation-2012-10?IR=T&

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority ordered a local unit of India’s largest bank to pay a HK$7.5 million ($960,000) penalty for failing to carry out proper checks to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing.

In its first action since gaining new anti-money laundering powers in 2012, the HKMA said the Hong Kong branch of State Bank of India had failed to carry out customer due diligence before establishing business relationships with 28 corporate customers between April 2012 and November 2013.

The unit also failed to monitor its customers properly, and had inadequate procedures for determining whether account holders were so-called politically exposed persons, the HKMA said in a statement.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-bank-of-india-over-money-laundering-controls

Tax authorities in India say they have sent notices to more than 500 individuals whose offshore holdings were revealed earlier this year by ICIJ and The Indian Express. These individuals included two members of Parliament and several prominent industrialists, and the inquiries from the income tax department seek details and transactions of their offshore companies and trusts. A new list of individuals with offshore holdings found in the Offshore Leaks database was also published earlier this week, and included a decorated former civil service officer and the wife of Delhi’s energy secretary.

In one of the first decisions by the new Indian government, led by newly-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a special task force has been set up to find and seize "black money" - cash that has been hidden away, mostly in foreign banks, in order to avoid taxes. The Special Investigation Team (SIT) is led by retired Supreme Court judge MB Shah.

The SIT will focus on money hidden both within India and abroad. Sources within the Finance Ministry told the Hindustan Times the team would investigate both the 700 names included in a list of private HSBC Bank Geneva account holders given to India by French authorities, and the more than 600 Indian citizens and companies included in ICIJ's Offshore Leaks database.

According to some estimates there is as much as $2 trillion at stake for India, which analysts say has contributed to widening inequality in the nation of more than 1.2 billion people.


http://www.icij.org/blog/2013/04/release-offshore-records-draws-worldwide-response