Ex-Goldman honcho Gupta convicted of insider trading

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc board member Rajat Gupta was convicted on Friday of illegally tipping his hedge-fund manager friend Raj Rajaratnam with secrets about the investment bank, a major victory for prosecutors seeking to root out insider trading on Wall Street.

With the entire world, and certainly GETCO's ES and EURUSD algos, focused on every single update out of the Italian Senate race, which now appears certain to not bring the necessary 158 seats to the Bersani-Monti coalition leading to a chaotic revote in the coming months, here is some tangential news of the "who could have ever seen this coming variety." Following last week's Heinz insider trading probe, which implicated a Goldman Sachs account in Zurich belonging to some private wealth client, who was so anonymous

Billionaire hedge fund titan Steven A. Cohen, one of the most high-profile and controversial Wall Street figures of the last decade, has been implicated in what federal officials are calling “the largest insider trading case ever charged by the SEC,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

It’s been two decades since Michael Milken, aka “the junk bond king,” was sentenced to ten years in prison following a blockbuster insider trading investigation that shined a light on bad Wall Street behavior during the go-go 1980s. At the time, federal prosecutors hoped the Milken conviction, and that of his fellow Wall Street fraudster Ivan Boesky, would send a powerful message to Wall Street that there are serious consequences for insider trading.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rajat Gupta, a consummate business insider who once sat on the board of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, was convicted on Friday of leaking secrets about the investment bank at the height of the financial crisis, a major victory for prosecutors seeking to root out illicit trading on Wall Street.