Mr. Gupta declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Gupta is clearly proud of his friendship with the Clintons. He once had a personal Web site — it was taken down last year — where he posted photographs of himself socializing with them. One showed him with Mr. Clinton on a golf course, arms draped around each other and smiling; another showed Mrs. Clinton posing with the Gupta family in Aspen. Mr. Gupta even dedicated two school construction projects he financed in a rural part of his native India to the Clintons, naming one of them after him and the other after her.

After Mr. Clinton left office, Mr. Gupta was one of two businessmen with whom the former president agreed to enter into consulting arrangements (the other was Ronald W. Burkle, a billionaire investor and major Democratic donor). In 2002, Mrs. Clinton began reporting her husband’s work for infoUSA on her Senate financial disclosure forms, but she does not have to disclose his income and it is not clear what he is paid.

The shareholder lawsuit against infoUSA, brought by two Connecticut-based hedge funds, Dolphin Limited Partnership and Cardinal Capital Management, forced that information into the open. It charges that Mr. Gupta’s spending on the Clintons is part of a pattern of improper company 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.

Mr. Gupta has 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. Mr. Gupta has moved to have the lawsuit dismissed; a decision is pending.

Representatives of Dolphin and Cardinal declined to comment. Herbert A. Denton, president of Providence Capital, a New York hedge fund that also invested in infoUSA and had pressed for management changes, said the expenditures cited in the lawsuit were hard to defend.

“When the C.E.O. of a publicly traded company can say with a straight face that the shareholders benefit from having a yacht with an all-female crew stationed in the Virgin Islands, then you’ve got a problem,” Mr. Denton said.

The lawsuit says Mr. Clinton signed a consulting agreement in April 2002 to “provide confidential advice and counsel to the chairman and C.E.O. of the company for the purpose of strategic growth and business development.” InfoUSA made $2.1 million in quarterly payments to Mr. Clinton from July 2003 to April 2005, and in October 2005 entered into a new three-year agreement to pay him $1.2 million. It also gave him an option to buy 100,000 shares of infoUSA stock, with no expiration date.