By Arun Kumar

Washington, May 23 (IANS) Rajat Gupta, a former Indian American managing director of the global consulting firm McKinsey & Co, accused by US regulators of inside trading "has lived a double life," a leading US daily has suggested.

In March, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed an administrative order against him saying that he had passed confidential information to hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam.

Government wiretaps and phone records show that Gupta called Rajaratnam nine times in 2008 and 2009, giving the hedge fund manager information to make trades for his Galleon Group.

Gupta, 62, who divides his time between Connecticut, Manhattan and Florida, has lived a double life, the Washington Post suggested Sunday.

For 34 years until 2007, he worked for McKinsey, one of the world's most trusted and prestigious consulting firms.

As a philanthropist, Gupta raised millions of dollars for education and health care, especially in India, where he was born and to which he wanted to give back, the Post noted.

"He has done charitable work with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Friends describe him as brilliant and humble," it said.

"At McKinsey, a firm known for keeping secrets, Gupta harboured a few of his own," the Post suggested.

But as the managing director and then as senior partner of McKinsey for four more years before he retired, he ran his own consulting business on the side, it said describing it as a violation of McKinsey rules.

He and Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey partner who last year pleaded guilty to passing confidential information to Rajaratnam, set up their own firm.

Gupta also independently advised Genpact, a Gurgaon, India-based firm that manages business processes for other companies. "That work, too, broke McKinsey's rules," the Post said.

In December 2006, two years before he reached McKinsey's mandatory retirement age of 60, Gupta co-founded private-equity firm New Silk Route Partners with investors, three of whom had paid fines to settle SEC actions against them.

Among the three was Rajaratnam, whose Galleon Group paid $2 million in a fine and forfeited profits to the government in May 2005 to settle an SEC complaint that it had made improper trades.

The Kumar conviction and the SEC action against Gupta have been a blow to McKinsey's elite image, the Post said.