Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of the Galleon hedge fund accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission of insider trading, has rejected the charges against him.

In a court filing on Tuesday, Mr Rajaratnam denied the SEC’s allegations and accused the government of violating his constitutional rights with its use of wiretaps.

The SEC alleged in October that Mr Rajaratnam conducted insider trading in securities of a host of companies, including Google, Intel, Hilton and AMD.

But in the filing, Mr Rajaratnam said Galleon analysts “[utilized] their own expertise as well as third party research reports and other publicly available information to formulate their opinions.”

Furthermore: “the research performed by the Galleon analysts was more detailed and precise than any of the information that the [SEC] alleges was  purportedly conveyed to Mr Rajaratnam.”

Mr Rajaratnam also deplored the SEC’s use of wiretaps — as detailed in this FT story — as an “unprecedented use of electronic surveillance” and a violation of his constitutional and statutory rights.

He also accused the government of misrepresenting the facts as regards Roomy Khan, a cooperating witness in the case. In the filing, Mr Rajaratnam claimed the government made “materially false statements” to the court when it said, in support of its wiretap applications, that Ms Khan had “not yet been charged with any crimes”. According to the filing, Ms Khan was convicted of wire fraud in 2001.

The SEC, for its part, said simply: “We look forward to presenting our case in court.”

This entry was posted by Stacy-Marie Ishmael on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 14:03 and is filed under Capital markets, Hedge funds, People. Tagged with Galleon, insider trading, Raj rajaratnam, roomy khan, sec. Edit this entry.