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They were business school friends who worked at prestigious Wall Street firms Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Plc. They also shared a high-rise apartment in Manhattan for a while, played squash frequently, and went on international adventures together. Then one of them filmed his pal allegedly pleading with him to remove damaging text conversations while the other was wearing a wire.
Brijesh Goel, a former Goldman banker, was detained last month on suspicion of insider trading. According to persons with knowledge of the situation, his friend, former Barclays trader Akshay Niranjan, is listed as “co-conspirator 1” in the criminal complaint against Goel and is the one who betrayed his friend.
Goel, 37, allegedly remarked, “F—-… This we need to remove,” in a conversation Niranjan, 33, taped. “Have we made any trades? … It must be removed. Not even this chat exists for me.”
Even the tightest of relationships can fall apart when the FBI is involved, as betrayals are by no means unheard of in the worlds of high finance or organised crime. According to court filings, two young males were making their way on Wall Street, having fun together, and allegedly exchanging information about impending mergers before one of them turned on the other.
Goel has entered a not guilty plea to the charges of conspiracy, securities fraud, and obstruction of justice, and his attorney has specifically targeted Niranjan’s integrity.
Poker with low stakes
From the beginning, the two men connected on a deep level. They both hail from India, where they attended several campuses of the esteemed Indian Institute of Technology to get their degrees. While pursuing master’s degrees in quant-focused financial engineering at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, they crossed paths in 2012.
They all shared a social circle with approximately a dozen MFE students from India, according to two Haas classmates who claimed to be friends with the two males. However, the classmates, who requested anonymity, claimed that Goel and Niranjan also developed friendships with others outside of that circle, particularly with other students interested in employment on Wall Street.
Both men were quite intelligent, but Goel managed to distinguish out despite being older than many of the other pupils, according to a classmate. Goel was the student who raised his hand and provided the correct response when the professor asked if anyone could describe the assumptions behind the Black-Scholes model for pricing options on the very first day of class.
The classmates of Goel and Niranjan said that they both played poker frequently, which was not unusual for MFE students. Teachers at Haas encouraged students to play poker because it required them to assess risk and make quick decisions with money on the line. The students had little funds, therefore the stakes were minimal, with antes ranging from $5 to $20.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan claim that less than four years after graduating from Haas in 2013, Goel and Niranjan began taking far greater risks with money at stake.