SEC looks at Cahill, Goldman Sachs link
By Frank Phillips - The Boston Globe
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has delivered subpoenas to the state treasurer’s office in a wide-ranging request for documents concerning dealings between investment banking giant Goldman Sachs and former treasurer Timothy P. Cahill, onetime top staff members, and former campaign aides, according to an official briefed on the document request.
The agency’s subpoenas, which seek e-mails, phone records, schedules, files, and memorandums, come just over a month after Goldman Sachs removed itself from two state bond deals in Massachusetts following the disclosure that a vice president at the firm, Neil Morrison, was active in Cahill’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, which could violate federal securities regulations. Morrison had previously served as a top deputy to Cahill in the treasurer’s office.
The SEC served the papers just before the close of business Friday, catching the new treasurer, Steven Grossman, and his staff off guard. A spokesman for Grossman said the treasurer would not comment on details of what federal regulators are seek ing but said his staff is quickly assembling the requested material.
“We are cooperating fully and promptly with the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s request for documents consistent with our commitment to running a transparent and accountable Treasury,’’ the spokesman, Al Gordon, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Due to the nature of this matter, we cannot comment further.’’
A spokesman for Goldman Sachs, Michael DuVally, said yesterday the firm would have no comment. Cahill also declined to comment, telling the Globe he had not yet been informed of the subpoenas. “This is the first I heard of it, so I can’t really comment,’’ he said.
The SEC also would not comment on the subpoenas.
It is not clear from the subpoenas alone what direction the federal investigation is taking. An official who has been briefed on the documents said that they refer specifically to Goldman Sachs and seek all communications between Cahill’s office and Morrison and the investment bank dating back to June 1, 2008. The SEC, the official said, also asked for documents from the state Lottery and School Building Assistance authority, both of which are under the treasurer’s control.
The breadth of the subpoenas suggests federal regulators could be looking at possible connections between Cahill’s work as treasurer and his gubernatorial campaign, which was the subject of a separate investigation launched last year by the state attorney general’s office.
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2 COMMENTS:
“Former Bear Stearns mortgage executives who now run mortgage divisions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Ally Financial have been accused of cheating and defrauding investors through the mortgage securities they created and sold while at Bear. According to e-mails and internal audits, JPMorgan had known about this fraud since the spring of 2008, but hid it from the public eye through legal maneuvering. Last week a lawsuit filed in 2008 by mortgage insurer Ambac Assurance Corp against Bear Stearns and JPMorgan was unsealed. The lawsuit’s supporting e-mails, going back as far as 2005, highlight Bear traders telling their superiors they were selling investors like Ambac a “sack of shit.” . . .
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/01/bear-stearns-cheat-clients-out-of-billions/
Blankfein Flunks Asset Management as Jim Clark Vows No More Goldman Sachs
On Jan. 2, Jim Clark, a founder of such technology icons as Netscape Communications Corp. and Silicon Graphics Inc., was at home in Palm Beach, Florida, when he got an e-mail from an executive at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s private wealth management division. Goldman was offering Clark a chance to invest in the closely held social-networking company Facebook Inc. The deal -- through a fund overseen by Goldman Sachs Asset Management -- was being offered to other Goldman investors at the same time, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue.
The firm would levy a 4 percent placement fee on clients, plus a half percent “expense reserve” fee. It would also require investors to surrender 5 percent of any profits, known as “carried interest,” according to a Goldman Sachs document.
Clark turned Goldman down. In June, 2009, he had yanked most of the roughly $400 million he had invested with the firm due to what he considered bad advice and poor performance, including a big hit from GSAM’s Global Alpha hedge fund. This offer, he says, just irked him further. A few months earlier, he had purchased a stake in Facebook through another firm for a lower price, he says, and without the onerous carried interest.
“I don’t think it’s reasonable,” Clark says. “It’s just another way for them to make money from their clients.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-25/blankfein-flunks-asset-management-as-jim-clark-vows-no-more-goldman-sachs.html
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