Goldman Sachs said Monday that six private lawsuits alleging "breach of fiduciary duty, corporate waste, abuse of control, mismanagement and unjust enrichment" have been filed against the bank since the government charged it last month with committing fraud.Read the rest here
The rare announcement, in the form of a regulatory filing, underscores the widening legal assault that Goldman is facing as well as the firm's increasing sensitivity about telling investors any information that might be deemed pertinent.
The issue of disclosure is at the center of the Securities and Exchange Commission's civil fraud suit against the company. The SEC alleges that Goldman failed to tell clients looking to invest in the housing market important details about an investment opportunity the bank was touting, known as collateralized debt obligation. Goldman denies wrongdoing.
The private suits might not be the end of Goldman's legal challenges. Goldman said in its filing Monday that it expects more "regulatory and other investigations and actions commenced, with respect to offerings of collateralized debt obligations."
In addition, law enforcement sources said last week that the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation of Goldman's mortgage business. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described the probe as preliminary.
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Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Goldman Sachs hit with more lawsuits
More bad news for Goldman. Looks like they have their own oil spill heading their way.
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5 COMMENTS:
I always thought where fraud was involved one side got duped?..guess I was wrong b/c another financial luminary says so...
Ross said in the Bloomberg Radio interview that complicated derivatives didn’t cause the financial crisis that pushed the U.S. into the worst slump since the Great Depression.
“You need two sides to the trade in order to have it occur,” he said. “Only one side is going to be right at any point in time.”
http://tinyurl.com/2chqyz4
Well talk about denial..maybe its a culture of theft? If you pulled off the greatest theft known to the world what would your partners do?
By Christine Harper
May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s employee morale remains good and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein received a standing ovation from partners at an April 20 earnings call, analyst Brad Hintz told clients.
According to the firm, “employees are pulling together like a team under pressure,” Hintz, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., wrote in a note to clients today after a meeting with five senior executives at Goldman Sachs. “The partnership has closed ranks, too, and at Goldman’s April 20, 2010, managing directors earnings call, Lloyd Blankfein received a standing ovation from his partners.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=acmzzr77frLs&pos=4
Bankers Get Bonuses, USA Gets the Great Recession
Wall Street banks with financial ties to mortgage lenders fueled bad--and often fraudulent--mortgage lending, created phony mislabeled securities, and off-loaded the temporarily disguised risk on bond insurers (MBIA, Ambac, AIG, FGIC, and more) and naïve investors to keep the Ponzi scheme going. A housing bubble fueled by corrupt finance damaged the U.S. economy, and taxpayers bailed out the chief culprits. ("Goldman Sachs: Spinning Gold," HuffPo, April 7, 2010)
Those with "friends in high places" did the most damage to the nation's economy and personally profited the most. The high pay of Wall Street and its cronies doesn't reflect efficient markets or individual brilliance; it's a market failure. The Great Bailout protected debt holders and some shareholders in corrupt financial institutions. Culprits involved in phony securitizations that damaged the economy have windfall gains and are now heavily subsidized with taxpayer dollars. Bill Ackman's ordeal shows us how much endurance will be required to reverse these mistakes and reform the financial system.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janet-tavakoli/fight-club-ackmans-hedge_b_562568.html
I won’t go so far as to say that Goldman is lying, when it claims that “[b]y the very nature of a synthetic CDO”, one party hopes to benefit from an increase and another party hopes to gain from a decrease in the value of the referenced assets. But I will say that that the statement is factually wrong, and that Goldman knows very well it is factually wrong. If we are generous, we might categorize the statement as a sloppy simplification, a rhetorical imprecision that happens to flatter Goldman Sachs.
If a position is not client-initiated, but initiated by the bank in response to some other party’s wishes, then the bank is not acting as a market maker but as an agent for the initiating party. An investment bank is free to act as an agent for a client when it trades at arms-length in public markets. But it may not act as an agent of a client while transacting with underwriting clients, unless it discloses the nature of the relationship. This failure to disclose is the essence of Goldman’s ethical foul in the ABACUS deal.
http://tinyurl.com/32mnlav
Another "GOLDEN" bet. This time against the Gulf of Mexico one day before the oil rig exploded. Coincidence?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-borowitz/goldman-sachs-reveals-it_b_558774.html
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