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Rajat Gupta, the first Indian Managing Director of McKinsey turned convicted felon serving 19 months in prison for inside trading, in his memoir ‘Mind Without Fear’ says he should have trusted his wife’s instincts about tangling with the world of high finance.

“These aren’t our people,” the former McKinsey & Co. managing director and former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. director says his wife would tell him. “You’re too trusting and you think everyone will be nice to you. Financial people are different consultants. They’ll eat you for lunch!”

The title ‘Mind Without Fear’ was drawn from the much-quoted English translation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.

The memoir comes just months after a federal appeals court declined to throw out Gupta’s 2012 conviction. Gupta had argued that United States prosecutors failed to prove he got a personal benefit for passing tips to his friend, billionaire hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. A federal jury had found Gupta guilty of passing tips about Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs and the bank’s financial results. While Gupta has already served his prison term, a ruling in his favor would have cleared his record.

In an interview to NDTV, he has blamed prosecutor Preet Bharara for going after him.

"Prosecutors are all about winning. They are not necessarily searching for the truth," Gupta told NDTV, claiming he was a scapegoat.

"We had this dramatic financial crisis. It is very clear now if you look at it as to who the primary people who were responsible for that financial crisis. It was a mortgage lending-led crisis, financial institutions, banks, housing finance companies, were very involved in leveraging themselves, making loans that they should have never made, so on and so forth and practices that were quite not right. Not one of those people has been held accountable. Not a single bank CEO, senior management, has been convicted. They have been fined heavily which obviously, the shareholders of the banks pay," Rajat quoted saying by NDTV.

He said the "the real perpetrators" of that financial meltdown were never brought to justice or held accountably".

"I think the prosecutors were looking for a 'we have to find something, let's go after hedge fund managers', things like that when they did not contribute to the financial crisis at all in any way. So part of that was 'let's find this scapegoat'," Rajat Gupta said.

Preet Bharara, who is of Indian origin, was the prosecutor in Rajat Gupta's case. He had also hit the headlines several years ago after he had handcuffed Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade over charges of visa fraud to bring a nanny to the United States, which led to considerable diplomatic tension between India and the U.S.

In his book, Rajat Gupta has alluded to his immigrant status as possibly playing a role in his conviction.

When NDTV asked him why he thought so, given that Bharara was also of Indian origin. "I don't know, you have to ask him what his motivations were but I can see that he would say that I am tough against anybody and I am tough against even my own people of my own origin. It could be. I don't know if that's true or not. I would say also that he was very, he is known to be very media-savvy. I write in the book, I don't know exactly how much but he certainly increased the media presence and the media staff in his own organization," Gupta said

"He was reprimanded by the judges for trying the case in media before actually trying it in the court. This is not about Preet Bharara versus me or anything like that," he told NDTV.

Born in India, orphaned as a teen, Rajat Gupta went on to study at the Indian Institute of Technology(IIT)-Delhi and then got a scholarship to the Harvard Business School. At the age of 45, he was the youngest head of McKinsey and then a director at Goldman Sachs.

In 2012, Rajat Gupta was convicted after a jury trial for passing confidential boardroom information to the now-jailed hedge fund manager and his one-time friend and business associate Raj Rajaratnam.

By Sowmya Sangam