New York:Shareholders of infoUSA have filed a lawsuit against Vinod Gupta, an entrepreneur from India, alleging that he wasted the company’s money trying to “integrate himself” with his high profile guests, including former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton.
The New York Times said when Clintons took a family vacation in January 2002 to Acapulco, Mexico, one of their longtime supporters, Gupta, provided his company’s private jet to fly them there.
InfoUSA, one of the nation’s largest brokers of information on consumers, paid $146,866 to ferry the Clintons, Gupta and others to Acapulco and back, the paper reported.
During the next four years, infoUSA paid 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 Hillary Clinton to campaign events.
Those expenses, the Times said, are cited in a lawsuit filed late last year in a Delaware court by angry shareholders.
The disclosure of the trips and the consulting fees, the paper said, is just a small part of a broader complaint about the way Gupta has managed his company. But for the former president, and for the senator, it offers significant new details about their relationship with an “unusually generous benefactor” whose business practices have lately come under scrutiny.