Former BBC Director Apologizes for Failure of Digital Project

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Siemens Appoints A Director From SAP

The appointment was one of several changes in top Siemens management announced on Wednesday as the company tries to move past the upheaval surrounding Mr. Löscher’s departure in July.

Mr. Ackermann, 65, will be replaced by Jim Hagemann Snabe, who remains the top executive at SAP, but has said he plans to leave that post next year for a seat on that company’s board.

Mr. Ackermann, the former head of Deutsche Bank and one of Germany’s best-known business figures, left the Siemens board last week, citing “questions of style and fairness” in the company’s dealings after the board had Mr. Löscher removed. German news reports said Mr. Ackermann had opposed the board’s decision to oust Mr. Löscher and replace him with Joe Kaeser, then the company’s chief financial officer, after Siemens missed several profit targets.

On Wednesday, Siemens named Ralf P. Thomas to succeed Mr. Kaeser as chief financial officer. Mr. Thomas has been the finance chief of the company’s industry division.

Siemens is a pillar of the German economy, and its boardroom turmoil drew the attention of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who thought it was important for the company to “return to calm waters,” according to her spokesman. The company, based in Munich, has 370,000 employees worldwide and makes heavy-duty industrial goods, including power turbines, locomotives and medical imaging devices. It is a rival to General Electric.

The chairman of the Siemens board, Gerhard Cromme, said Mr. Snabe, 47, would bring knowledge of software and computer technology.

“In view of the growing strategic importance of digitalization for Siemens’s core businesses, we are adding to the technology and software competence of the supervisory board,” Mr. Cromme said in a statement. “We are gaining an internationally respected expert in this area.”

Bits Blog: Hollywood Director Takes On Texting While Driving

DealBook: Fallen Goldman Director Appeals for a New Trial

Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesRajat Gupta, center, left court in October after being sentenced to two years in prison. He was convicted of leaking confidential information to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge fund manager.

8:28 p.m. | Updated

It was perhaps the most critical piece of evidence in the trial of Rajat K. Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs director found guilty last year of leaking the bank’s boardroom discussions to his hedge fund friend.

“I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share,” his friend, the money manager Raj Rajaratnam, told a colleague during an October 2008 conversation that federal investigators secretly recorded.

On Tuesday, a lawyer for Mr. Gupta argued that a federal appeals court should overturn his client’s conviction and grant a new trial because the verdict was tainted by the erroneous admission of that statement and other wiretapped conversations.

“The wiretaps should never have been admitted,” said Mr. Gupta’s lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, during the argument at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan.

Last June, a jury convicted Mr. Gupta, 64, of sharing Goldman’s confidential information with Mr. Rajaratnam. The presiding trial court judge, Jed S. Rakoff, sentenced Mr. Gupta to two years in prison. A year earlier, Mr. Rajaratnam was found guilty at trial and given an 11-year sentence. His appeal is also pending.

The men, who came to this country from South Asia as university students and rose to the highest ranks of business, are two of the most prominent figures caught up in the government’s crackdown on illegal conduct on Wall Street trading floors. Since 2009, the United States attorney in Manhattan has charged 81 individuals; of those, 73 have either pleaded guilty or been convicted.

With his freedom hanging in the balance, Mr. Gupta attended Tuesday’s hearing, accompanied by his wife, his four daughters and about a dozen friends. He was once one of the world’s most admired executives, having served for a decade as the global chairman of the management consultancy McKinsey & Company. Mr. Gupta, who lives in Westport, Conn., is free on bail pending the outcome of his appeal.

The hearing, in a cramped courtroom in the stately old federal courthouse building on Foley Square, was packed with spectators. About two dozen summer law school interns from Mr. Waxman’s firm, WilmerHale, came to watch, as did a class of curious high school students from the Beacon School on the Upper West Side. The youth-filled courtroom pushed several members of Mr. Gupta’s large legal team and a group of senior government prosecutors into a crowded anteroom, where they watched a televised simulcast of the proceeding.

Mr. Waxman tried to convince the three-judge panel — Jon O. Newman, Amalya L. Kearse and Rosemary S. Pooler — that the lower court had made a series of incorrect rulings at trial. Much of the discussion centered on a ruling by Judge Rakoff that curtailed the testimony of Mr. Gupta’s daughter Geetanjali Gupta. She had planned to testify that at the time of the tips cited by prosecutors, her father told her that he believed Mr. Rajaratnam had stolen money from him.

Judge Rakoff curbed her testimony, allowing her to say only that her father was upset with Mr. Rajaratnam. If the jury had heard that Mr. Rajaratnam might have cheated Mr. Gupta, “that testimony would have powerfully refuted the government’s theory of motive,” Mr. Waxman argued.

Judge Newman appeared skeptical that the daughter’s testimony would have swayed the jury given the substantial circumstantial evidence of Mr. Gupta’s guilt.

“You’re telling me that if the jury had heard that statement it would have disregarded all the other evidence in the case?” Judge Newman asked. “How realistic is that?”

Later in the argument, Judge Newman recounted damning evidence from the trial — phone logs and trading records indicating that less than one minute after hanging up from a Goldman board call, Mr. Gupta phoned Mr. Rajaratnam, who quickly bought about $35 million worth of Goldman stock.

“Are you telling us that that’s a coincidence?” Judge Newman asked.

Mr. Waxman tried to avoid answering the question, but Judge Newman persisted. “O.K., I embrace it — it’s a coincidence,” said Mr. Waxman, a former solicitor general of the United States who is considered one of the country’s top appellate lawyers.

Richard C. Tarlowe, the federal prosecutor who argued the appeal for the government, seized upon Judge Newman’s incredulity when he rose to speak. “The argument” — that the phone calls and trades were coincidental — “was made to the jury, and it was rejected because of its absurdity,” he said.

For Mr. Gupta to have his conviction reversed, the appeals court does not have to believe in his innocence. Rather, he can win a new trial if the judges decide that Judge Rakoff improperly admitted the wiretapped conversations between Mr. Rajaratnam and his colleagues suggesting that he had an inside source at Goldman, or made other faulty rulings.

“The court’s decidedly asymmetrical interpretation of the rules of evidence left the jury with a distorted picture, in which Gupta was accused by the self-serving hearsay of a known fabulist,” Mr. Gupta’s legal team wrote in court papers.

During the argument, Mr. Waxman characterized Mr. Rajaratnam’s statements as unreliable, and described him as a braggart who “lied about his sources to impress his subordinates.”

A ruling by the appeals court is expected in the coming months. One party closely watching for a decision is Goldman Sachs, which had a lawyer attend Tuesday’s hearing. In February, a judge ordered Mr. Gupta to pay Goldman more than $6.2 million to reimburse the bank for legal expenses related to an internal investigation and other costs. But because the bank’s bylaws require it to cover legal fees for top officers and directors, Goldman is paying for Mr. Gupta’s costly defense, which has reached at least $35 million.

Mr. Gupta agreed to reimburse the bank for his legal bills if a jury convicted him, but Goldman must continue to pay them until the final outcome of his appeal.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 22, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of Rajat Gupta's conviction. It was in June 2012, not May 2012.

Corner Office: Francesca Zambello: Glimmerglass Festival’s Director, on Making Ideas Work

Q. Do you remember the first time you were in a leadership role?

A. I started a theater company at Colgate because I didn’t like the university theater company. I found it was too regimented and too formal. I raised the money. I got the people. This is what I’ve been doing my whole career. It’s just that the productions get bigger and bigger.

Q. When did your interest in the theater take hold?

A. I’m in the family business. My mother is an actress. My father started as an actor. So many of their friends were people in the theater. If my parents were working, I was backstage watching. Of course, I started to mimic them, but I was most interested in the stage manager. From about age 5, I loved to sit with that person as they would say, “Move this here, move that there.” When I was still a child I started a theater company in my basement with kids from around the neighborhood. So the directing gene, which is a leadership gene, started early on.

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. When you’re in your 20s and have that leadership gene, the bad thing is that you don’t know when to shut up. You think you know all the answers, but you don’t. What you learn later is when to just listen to everybody else. I’m finding that all those adages about being humble and listening are truer and truer as I get older. Creativity cannot explode if you do not have the ability to step back, take in what everybody else says and then fuse it with your own ideas.

Theater is one of the most collaborative art forms, and you have to be able to absorb everything that people tell you. That’s not any different from really good businesses. When I go into meetings with successful business people, I’m always amazed at how much they’re able to just sit there and absorb things and then make a really good decision.

Q. What are some memorable lessons that you’ve learned from mentors?

A. I worked for a French director for a number of years as an associate. The most important thing he ever taught me was that if you don’t make sure the show is right in a small room, it will never be right in a big space, on a big stage.

Q. That would also seem to true for a lot of different fields.

A. Exactly. It’s all about that detail in the beginning — detail and honest, creative work. I have a lot of respect for many business people, because the reason they’re successful is they were creative. They had a vision, which is why I don’t think that’s any different than what I do. A lot of people know how to crank it out. A lot of people know how to copy others. Not a lot of people have an original idea. Having original ideas is what makes you successful, if you know how to implement them. It’s a rare thing because some people have the ideas and other people have the mechanics, but they can’t do both.

Q. Other broad insights you’ve gained over the course of your career?

A. You have to learn how to fail. You have to understand that in any position where you’re at the top, you will fail, and if you don’t fail, you’re probably not that good. So you have to learn how to cope with that. The more you get knocked down, the more you learn how to pick yourself up. It’s like a boxer. In your 20s, you’ll feel devastated when somebody fires you. I’ve been fired a number of times in my life and then rehired by a better company or given a better job. In a way, one of the things I respect the most about businesses is that when they fire somebody, they’re gone the next day. One of the problems you sometimes see in the arts is that they fire leaders but it drags on.

Q. What advice do you give people starting out in their careers — not just in the theater, but in any career?

A. Don’t do something to make money. I think a lot of people who are really wealthy probably didn’t start out saying, “I’m doing this to make a lot of money.” When you’re starting something, I really believe you have to have that passion. There has to be a burn, like a shark going after blood.

Q. What are some things you’re looking for when you’re interviewing people?

A. I think good manners matter a lot. If two people are similar but somebody’s manners are a bit better, I’ll hire that person. It might be that they show up five minutes early for something. Or they stand up when someone important comes in the room. Some of those are old-fashioned things, but manners don’t cost anything. I’m also interested in how people dress. I’m in a visual profession. I don’t think that guys have to wear ties and girls have to wear dresses. I think people have to be neat. A lot of times people aren’t neat.

Q. Tell me about the interview questions you ask.

A. I ask people how hard they’re willing to work — “If I ask you to stay here until midnight tonight and help work on this situation, do you feel comfortable doing that?”

I also feel that with anybody I hire, I want to make sure they are going to reflect my principles.

Q. And what are your principles?

A. Being moral. Being responsible. I think the arts are integrated with social ideas. We must use the arts as a tool to make people live better and to think about their situation, to think about the human condition, about what they can do for others around them, for themselves. I think that much of the arts speak to those basic moral issues. I also need to know whether this person can get along with a range of people and not crack up in a bad situation.

Q. How do you get a sense of that from an interview?

A. I ask questions that catch people off guard, like: What was the most frightening thing you ever encountered in your life? What was the best thing you ever did for somebody else? That’s one of my best questions. You see what’s inside them.

ALI Names Harvard Law School Prof as New Director

Daniel J. Meltzer, the Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, is set to take over as the director of the American Law Institute in June 2014.

Pepper Hamilton Hires Discovery Services Director

Pepper Hamilton CEO Scott Green, himself no stranger to starting up an e-discovery services component of a large law firm, has hired a new director of discovery services and litigation support.