Galleon founder’s take reached $36m, US says

US prosecutors in New York filed court papers yesterday in Manhattan opposing Rajaratnam’s bid for reduced bail. As part of the filing, the prosecutors said Rajaratnam’s profits in the scheme were about $36 million. They previously claimed he got about $17 million.

“The government now has evidence that Rajaratnam’s illicit gains yielded profits that were at least twice as large as those previously alleged,’’ assistant US attorneys Joshua Klein and Jonathan Streeter wrote in the court filing. Rajaratnam’s trades netted “at least approximately $36 million,’’ they said.

Rajaratnam, who also was sued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, was arrested on Oct. 16 and accused of earning millions of dollars from stock trades made with inside information from corporate officials and hedge fund executives.

He and Danielle Chiesi, an executive at New Castle Funds LLC, were indicted by a federal grand jury last month. Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey & Co. director who was arrested with Rajaratnam, Chiesi, and three others in October, has agreed to waive his right to require prosecutors to get an indictment, a sign he may plead guilty.

In all, 21 people have been charged in two overlapping insider-trading schemes. Six of those have pleaded guilty. Rajaratnam, who is free on $100 million bail, has denied wrongdoing.

In yesterday’s filing, prosecutors said they plan to file a superseding indictment that will expand the charges against Rajaratnam to include allegations related to the acquisition of ATI Technologies Inc. by Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

In that deal, Rajaratnam got illegal tips from “an inside source’’ to whom he had begun making large payments in 2004, prosecutors said. Rajaratnam had Galleon buy ATI securities before the AMD announcement, reaping $19 million in illegal profits, according to prosecutors.

Kumar was previously accused of tipping Rajaratnam about an AMD spinoff of its semiconductor manufacturing operations in a joint venture with ATI, an investment company formed by the government of Abu Dhabi, in October 2008. Kumar’s lawyer, Robert Morvillo, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment yesterday.

John Dowd, Rajaratnam’s lawyer, said in a statement after the new allegations became public that “an analyst’s prediction that AMD would acquire ATI was widely reported in the press more than seven weeks before the acquisition was announced.’’

Separately, an unnamed AMD executive was cited in the criminal complaint against Chiesi. The AMD executive allegedly told Chiesi about an impending spinoff. That person is Hector Ruiz, AMD’s former chief executive, according to a person familiar with the investigation. Ruiz stepped down as CEO of AMD, the world’s second-largest maker of personal-computer processors, in 2008.

Prosecutors oppose Rajaratnam’s request to have his bail reduced to $20 million. They said that the case against him is strong, that he may flee to Sri Lanka, that he faces almost 15 years in prison, and that he has fewer ties to the United States now that he is closing Galleon.

“The resources at the defendant’s disposal are vast,’’ the prosecutors wrote, citing a news report that Rajaratnam is worth as much as $1.8 billion.