Sadiq Asyraf/AP Photo
A 2018 anti-corruption protest in Malaysia. Goldman Sachs’s role in the 1MDB scandal facilitated wholesale theft of billions of dollars from the country.
Today is the first investor day in the history of Goldman Sachs. Most of the vampire squid’s lifespan was spent outside of public stock markets, and for the last 20 years the bank might have considered displays of image boosting and financial transparency beneath them. But with Goldman evolving under new CEO (and actual techno DJ) David Solomon, it has succumbed, particularly to tout its online consumer banking arm Marcus, a foray into catering to the non-penthouse set.
Solomon announced a higher financial target and investors lapped it up, boosting Goldman shares in early trading. But there’s a cloud hanging over investor day, a shoe that has yet to drop.
Last month, the financial press reported that Goldman was in talks with prosecutors to pay close to $2 billion to settle claims over a spectacularly flamboyant scandal involving a sovereign wealth fund known as 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB. This has not been resolved, despite the desire from Goldman to put it in the past. But it should give investors all the information they need about the bank’s eagerness to follow the money, the law be damned.
“This was not a run-of-the-mill financial crime,” said Dennis Kelleher, who runs the financial-reform organization Better Markets. “A prosecutor was butchered here. Malaysia was subjected to a corrupt prime minister for five years. It wouldn’t have happened but for Goldman Sachs money.”
Better Markets released a paper about 1MDB last April, based on publicly available information. The paper highlights some elements that have gotten lost in the spectacular retelling of the story, the subject of a well-done book by Wall Street Journal writers Tom Wright and Bradley Hope called Billion Dollar Whale.
“This was not a run-of-the-mill financial crime … It wouldn’t have happened but for Goldman Sachs money.”
The basic outline is this: A young con artist named Jho Low wormed his way into the inner circle of Malaysian power and took over management of 1MBD, handling money that was intended for infrastructure improvements in the poor country. Low outright stole at least $4.5 billion from the fund, using it to finance an impossibly ostentatious lifestyle that included a $250 million yacht, Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront Oscar, Britney Spears’s appearance (she popped out of a cake) at his 31st birthday party in Las Vegas, and a producer credit on Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.
At the time, Goldman was trying to increase its presence in Asia, part of a business line it termed “monetizing the state.” Under the direction of its Asia chairman Tim Leissner (who would eventually marry Russell Simmons’s ex-wife, Kimora Lee Simmons), Goldman cultivated the Malaysia relationship, becoming lead adviser on 1MDB in 2009.
In 2012 and 2013, Goldman underwrote three no-bid, privately placed bond deals that raised $6.5 billion for 1MDB, but which Low mostly stole or used to bribe officials to keep quiet. The bank took an astronomical $600 million in fees on the deals, at least ten times the going rate; some analysts pegged it at over two hundred). It was a handsome sum to look the other way at one of the greatest thefts in the history of international finance.
Kelleher focuses on the last of the three bond deals, which came two months before then-Prime Minister Najib Razak won re-election in May 2013. Proceeds from that final deal were diverted into a campaign kitty that funded bribes across Malaysia. Najib squeaked through to re-election and remained in power until 2018; he’s now on trial for fraud. This extended corruption and violence across the country for a half-decade, including at least three high-profile murders of people involved with the case. One prosecutor was found dismembered in an oil drum.
“That money was immediately wired to a tiny Swiss bank, over the objection of Goldman Sachs lawyers,” Kelleher noted. He added that Najib’s corruption was evident at the time; a year before the election, a hundred thousand protesters demonstrated across Malaysia. “Everyone knew,” Kelleher said.
Of course, Goldman Sachs’s defense is that they didn’t know. Even though Leissner pleaded guilty to bribery, conspiracy, and money laundering and will serve potentially life in prison, Goldman has repeatedly claimed that he was a rogue banker, including in a non-apology apology to the Malaysian people. Executives, Goldman insists, had no knowledge of the depths of the fraud at 1MDB or how the bond money they underwrote would ultimately be used.
Better Markets paints a compelling case that this is completely implausible, that one banker couldn’t evade all of Goldman’s compliance, legal, and audit systems. And if he could, it’s a rationale for shutting down a mega-bank that cannot manage to detect clear and present fraud.
Just earning $600 million on $6.5 billion in bond underwriting should have raised red flags, according even to Goldman partners. Then-CEO Lloyd Blankfein attended two meetings with Najib and Jho Low; one of them, a so-called “one-on-one sit-down” with Low, occurred three years after the bank’s compliance officers warned that Goldman “shouldn’t do business with him.” 1MDB was part of the discussions in the meetings.
Leissner himself said during his court plea that he “conspired with other employees and agents of Goldman Sachs very much in line of its culture of Goldman Sachs to conceal facts from certain compliance and legal employees.” At least one other associate, Roger Ng, was criminally charged, and Andrea Vella, a third executive who helped structure the bonds, was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator (he’s currently on leave). Blankfein openly praised Leissner and Vella at a meeting in 2014: “Look at what Tim and Andrea did in Malaysia … We have to do more of that.”
“One of the ways a corporate entity avoids responsibility is, you can always have a one-off … You can’t have a thirty-off that involves partners and the CEO.”
In all, over 30 top Goldman executives were aware of the bank’s dealings with 1MDB, including Blankfein, COO and president Gary Cohn (who would later work in the Trump White House), and current CEO Solomon, the co-head of investment banking at the time. “One of the ways a corporate entity avoids responsibility is, you can always have a one-off,” Kelleher said. “You can’t have a thirty-off that involves partners and the CEO. There’s a reason ‘rogue’ is singular.”
But while the revelation of Blankfein’s involvement briefly collapsed Goldman’s stock price in 2018, the company has skated past accountability. In addition to smearing Leissner as a rogue kleptocrat, the bank hired Mark Filip, a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, the former law firm of Attorney General William Barr. Amazingly, Barr got a waiver from conflict-of-interest rules to participate in the 1MDB case. The head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Brian Benczkowski, also came from Kirkland & Ellis and also received a waiver.
This is going as well as you’d expect. The rumored fine of under $2 billion is far less than the $7.5 billion Malaysian prosecutors want from Goldman. Reportedly, an Asian subsidiary would admit guilt, protecting the parent company from collateral consequences. An independent compliance monitor would add window dressing to the settlement. “It’s a non-punishment that looks like a punishment,” Kelleher said.
It was assumed Goldman would push more money onto the table if they could get it out of the way before investor day. But that moment has come and gone. The bank has reported bad earnings of late because it had to reserve funds for 1MDB actions. The hovering scandal has hampered Solomon’s efforts to recast Goldman as a friendly retail bank. “I can’t wait to go into a Goldman Sachs branch so they can rob me in person,” Kelleher snarked.
This just adds to a billowing rap sheet of Goldman scandals and illegal activities, which include nearly $10 billion in fines. None of this has appeared to change the culture at the bank, as the scandals keep emerging. In the 1MDB case, Goldman’s rush for profit robbed the citizens of a desperate country, propped up an autocrat, and rained down untold suffering and ballooning debt. That Goldman is cozying up to investors as if everything’s normal says a lot about our culture of elite impunity.
The same month Najib won re-election, Goldman put out a Business Standards Committee report promising that “integrity and honesty are at the heart of our business.” A policy adviser to the prime minister put it another way to Rolling Stone. Speaking of his corrupt former boss and the pilfering of Malaysia, he said, “All [Najib] needed was a signature and a couple of Goldman bankers.”
