By IANS
New York : Indian American businessman Vinod Gupta, known for his proximity to former US president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, has been accused by his shareholders of lavishly spending company money on high-profile guests.
Two Connecticut-based hedge funds, Dolphin Limited Partnership and Cardinal Capital Management, filed a lawsuit in a Delaware court against Gupta last year, CEO of infoUSA, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Both the funds have invested in Gupta's infoUSA, one of America's largest brokers of information on consumers.
According to the report, Gupta paid $146,866 to ferry Bill and Hillary Clinton, now a presidential contender herself, in his private jet in January 2002 for a family vacation in Acapulco, Mexico.
"During the next four years, infoUSA paid Mr. Clinton more than $2 million for consulting services, and spent almost $900,000 to fly him around the world for his presidential foundation work and to fly Mrs. Clinton to campaign events," The Times said in its report.
When the newspaper asked an infoUSA official to describe Clinton's consultancy services, he said that these were limited to making appearances at one or two company events each year.
According to the report, Gupta defended the expenses as legitimate and business-related, and he has accused the hedge funds of trying to wrest control of the company through a smear campaign.
He has moved to have the lawsuit dismissed and a decision is pending. When The Times tried to get Gupta's comments for the article, he declined.
The newspaper, in its edition last Sunday, had also reported that infoUSA sold consumer data several years ago to telemarketing criminals who used it to steal money from elderly Americans.
"It advertised call lists with titles like 'Elderly Opportunity Seekers' or 'Suffering Seniors', a compilation of people with cancer or Alzheimer's disease. The company called the episodes an aberration and pledged that it would not happen again," the report said.
Though the lawsuit has largely overlooked the Clintons' role, it charges that Gupta's spending on the Clintons is part of a pattern of improper expenditures for things like luxury cars, jets and houses, as well as a yacht that is notable for being one of the few to have an all-female crew.
Hailing from Rampur Maniharan, a small town near Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, Gupta secured a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur and a pursued a masters in agricultural engineering and business administration from the University of Nebraska.
Before starting American Business Information – which later on became infoUSA – he worked as marketing research manager in Commodore Corp. His company aimed to provide information services to American businessmen.
He was appointed by Clinton, before the latter's presidency ended, to the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Clinton had also nominated Gupta as the US consul general to Bermuda, and the US ambassador to Fiji, both posts the latter declined citing business commitments.
In 1992, Vinod Gupta gave $2 million to IIT Kharagpur for setting up the Vinod Gupta School of Management, and later donated $1 million to the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law.
He also financed two school construction projects in rural Uttar Pradesh, each of them named after one of the Clintons.