CEOs in Technology

Lawyers for Raj Rajaratnam, the alleged billionaire kingpin behind the insider trading scandal that brought down ex-AMD CEO and Globalfoundries chairman Hector Ruiz and IBM server chief Robert Moffat, filed papers with the US District Court in New York Tuesday denying that he got insider information or that he traded AMD, IBM, Sun and Intel stock among others based on it.

He claims he didn't pay for it and that the information was already public knowledge or that what he knew stemmed from garden-variety research.

Given that his assertions of innocence are going to be hard to maintain in the face of government wire taps, he needs to get the taps suppressed and so claims they fail the statutory test for wiretaps and violated his constitutional rights.

"Electronic surveillance is permitted only when necessary for the investigation of specified crimes and only when alternative investigative procedures have been tried or appear unlikely to succeed," his lawyers said.

They said the government failed to tell the judge who signed the wiretap warrant that Rajaratnam had been interviewed and turned over thousands of pages of documents.