Rajat Gupta’s two-year prison term ends

The release came weeks after a US court agreed to rehear his appeal to throw out his 2012 insider-trading conviction. Gupta, 67, was “released” on March 11, according to his prison records. Since Gupta’s prison term was to end on March 13, a Sunday, he was released on Friday, four years after he lost his insider trading trial and suffered multiple legal setbacks to overturn his conviction. The Harvard-educated Gupta was convicted in 2012, of passing confidential boardroom information to his one-time friend and business associate Raj Rajaratnam. 

Apart from the two-year prison term, he was fined USD 5 million and the Securities and Exchange Commission also slapped a USD 13.9 million penalty against him. 

Gupta started out his prison term in 2014 at FMC Devens, an administrative security federal medical centre with an  adjacent minimum security satellite camp in Massachusetts. Rajaratnam is serving an 11-year sentence for insider trading in the main prison adjacent to where Gupta was assigned.

His attorneys did not immediately respond to emails on whether Gupta would make a statement following his release. 

Ever since his conviction in June 2012, Gupta filed several appeals, including to the US Supreme Court, to overturn his conviction and prison term but the courts rejected his arguments and affirmed his sentence. 

However, it was only early last month, just weeks before his prison term was to end, that he had some legal respite when the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to rehear an appeal to throw out his insider-trading conviction.