The friendship between Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS) director, and Galleon Group LLC founder Raj Rajaratnam took center stage this morning at Gupta’s insider-trading trial, as prosecutors prepared to summon Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein to testify.
Blankfein will testify as a government witness today, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said during a break in the testimony. Blankfein, who was scheduled to testify on June 6, will take the stand this afternoon because of a scheduling conflict with his daughter’s graduation.
Michael DuVally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment on Blankfein’s testimony or his schedule.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.
The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.
Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed.
The sweetheart deals just keep coming. Lawbreakers at one bank after another are let off the hook as their shareholders write a check. And then they go out and repeat the illegal behavior they promised not to do in the last settlement.
It shouldn’t be surprising that this keeps happening over at the SEC – especially as long as Robert Khuzami continues to serve as Director of the Commission’s Division of Enforcement.
But while each of these deals has been shameful, destructive, and outrageous, the $22 million agreement with Goldman Sachs which the SEC announced today – another one in which the guilty party “neither confirms nor denies wrongdoing” – looks like the worst one yet.
The SEC has the power to shut Goldman Sachs down for what it did, and the offenses it describes are felonies. But they just gave out another slap on the wrist – no, make that a pat on the wrist – with today’s announcement.
Stop us when this confession from Greg Smith, a now former executive director and head of the Goldman’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, sounds exactly like everything we have said about the firm over the past 3+ years (and why we just can’t wait for the next trading “recommendation” from Tom Stolper).
Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructiveas I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.
…
I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.
When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. were warned by federal regulators that they may face civil claims tied to sales of mortgage-backed securities.
Goldman Sachs received a so-called Wells notice Feb. 24 from the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to disclosures for a late-2006 offering of $1.3 billion in subprime residential mortgage-backed securities, the firm said today in an annual financial report. Wells Fargo said it also got an SEC notice as the government examines whether it properly described facts and risks in offering documents.
Sure he will do all in his power to squirm out of this one.
REUTERS-
Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein may be asked to testify in a market regulator’s insider-trading case against a former director of the Wall Street bank, a judge ruled.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Rajat Gupta, a former board member at Goldman and Procter & Gamble, of giving inside tips about the two companies to his friend Raj Rajaratnam in 2008 and 2009.
No other state has experienced the dizzying heights of the housing boom or the depths of the subsequent bust quite like California. Today, four metro areas in the Golden State have the highest foreclosure rates in the country, eclipsing — for the first time — even Las Vegas, Nevada. In last night’s look at the housing crisis that continues to cripple this country, we traveled to southern California and met Lise Johnson, a mother of four who’s been in the same home for 12 years and is desperate to stay put.
As it turns out, JPMorgan is not the only financial institution that has been generous to the police foundation. In the 2009-10 year, Goldman Sachs, Barclays Capital, investment bank Jeffries and Co., investor Carl Icahn, and investment firm The Renco Group each gave over $100,000 to the foundation, putting them in the top-tier of donors, according to the foundation’s website. Bank of America also gave over $75,000 that year. (Another $100,000+ donor was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)
Keep in mind that’s just a single year’s worth of donations. As a private non-profit, the New York City Police Foundation does not have to release detailed donor information, so we don’t know of the the full scope of Wall Street money flowing into the NYPD.
New York prosecutors are widening their probe into the manner in which Goldman Sachs (GS.N) marketed certain mortgage-linked securities before the financial crisis, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The Federal Reserve issued an enforcement action Thursday against Goldman Sachs, saying the investment bank must investigate questionable lending and foreclosure practices in its mortgage unit.
The action orders Goldman to hire an independent consultant to investigate foreclosure proceedings by Litton Loan Servicing between 2009 and 2010.
The mortgage industry will take a step toward cleaning up some of its most controversial practices under a deal between a New York regulator and three financial firms, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Under the agreement with the state’s financial-services superintendent, Benjamin M. Lawsky, the three firms—Goldman, its Litton Loan Servicing business and Ocwen Financial Corp.—promised to end so-called robo-signing, in which bank employees signed foreclosure documents without reviewing case files as required by law. They also agreed to comb through loan files for evidence they mishandled borrowers’ paperwork and to cut mortgage payments for some New York homeowners.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has hired Reid Weingarten, a high-profile Washington defense attorney whose past clients include a former Enron accounting officer, according to a government source familiar with the matter.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Securities and Exchange Commission may have destroyed documents and compromised enforcement cases involving activity at large banks and hedge funds during the height of the financial crisis in 2008, according to allegations made by a lawmaker on Wednesday.
According to documents filed recently with the House Clerk, Issa went on a buying spree of high yield Goldman Sachs bonds at the same time he was running defense for the investment bank in Congress.
ThinkProgress-
Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) raised hell last year to stop the federal government from investigating Goldman Sachs regarding allegations that the company defrauded investors. In April 2010, shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced a civil suit against Goldman Sachs, Issa sent a letter to SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro demanding to know if there was “any sort of prearrangement, coordination, direction from, or advance notice” between the SEC and the Obama administration or congressional Democrats over the timing of the lawsuit.
In Chicago, it’s the sale of parking meters to the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. In Indiana, it’s the sale of the northern toll road to a Spanish and Australian joint venture. In Wisconsin it’s public health and food programs, in California it’s libraries. It’s water treatment plants, schools, toll roads, airports, and power plants. It’s Amtrak. There are revolving doors of corrupt politicians, big banks, and rating agencies. There are conflicts of interest. It’s bipartisan.
And it’s coming to a city near you — it may already be there. We’re talking about the sale of public assets to private investors. You may have heard of one-off deals, but what we’ll be exploring with the Huffington Post is the scale and scope of what is a national and organized campaign to shift the way we govern ourselves. In an era of increasingly stretched local and state budgets, privatization of public assets may be so tempting to local politicians that the trend seems unstoppable. Yet, public outrage has stopped and slowed a number of initiatives.
In addition to the cash payment, which may be adjusted at closing, Ocwen will pay about $337.4 million to retire some of Litton’s debt, according to a filing by West Palm Beach, Florida-based Ocwen. The sale of Litton comes two months after Goldman Sachs wrote down the value of the mortgage-servicing business by about $200 million.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, received a subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office seeking information on the firm’s activities leading into the credit crisis, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is investigating whether Goldman Sachs’ (GS.N) mortgage servicing arm did not conduct proper reviews before denying borrowers the option to lower their payments under a government loan modification programme.
In its quarterly filing with the SEC earlier this month, Goldman said regulators had sought information on the foreclosure and servicing protocols and activities of its mortgage servicing unit Litton Loan Servicing.
“We are in possession of the letter and are conducting an inquiry,” a NY Fed spokesperson told Reuters, referring to a letter from a Litton employee sent to the NY Fed by the Financial Times. A spokesperson for Goldman Sachs declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.
“I think we found a white elephant, flying pig and unicorn”
REUTERS–
Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) executives have good reason to be worried about the risk of receiving subpoenas from the Justice Department, and investors should be concerned too.
The U.S. government has a real chance of finding inconsistencies between Goldman executives’ testimony to Congress and their internal documents, which means subpoenas could turn into something more serious, lawyers said.
Matt Taibbi has a new article on Rolling Stone on the recent hearings in the U.S. Senate and whether or not Goldman Sachs executives should be facing criminal trials or not in the wake of ongoing investigations into their part in the financial meltdown we went through a few years ago. CNN decided to bring in the Atlantic Monthly’s Wall Street apologist Megan McArdle to debate Taibbi on Your Money.
A Senate committee has laid out the evidence. Now the Justice Department should bring criminal charges
Rolling Stones-
They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.
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