It was perhaps the most critical piece of evidence in the trial of Rajat K. Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs director found guilty last year of leaking the bank’s boardroom discussions to his hedge fund friend. “I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share,” his friend, the money manager Raj Rajaratnam, told a colleague during an October 2008 conversation that federal investigators secretly recorded. On Tuesday, a lawyer for Mr. Gupta argued that a federal appeals court should overturn his client’s conviction and grant a new trial because the verdict was tainted by the erroneous admission of that statement and other wiretapped conversations. “The wiretaps should never have been admitted,” said Mr. Gupta’s lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, during the argument at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan. More in the New York Times here.
