I wonder if there are days when Lucas van Praag gets to the office and says, "You gotta be shittin' me" when he's handed a memo about the latest skeevy deal he has to put a positive spin on and somehow sweep under the rug. I can just picture him in the boss's office, massaging his temples at the onset of yet another migraine and saying:
Really, Lloyd? REALLY? F**king Libya???
It seems Goldman Sachs lost some money for the Libyan sovereign wealth fund back in 2008. And by some I mean 98% of the $1.3 billion the fund had invested with the bank. Oops. Rather than telling Gaddafi to suck it, like you'd expect the bank to do with any of the other clients they've lost an ass-ton of money for, it appears they tried to cover his losses with a sweetheart deal for equity in the bank.
In a nutshell, it looks like they lost the $1.3 billion on bad bets in the currency market (and a handful of other bets on financial services and energy companies) and then approached Gaddafi about becoming a major shareholder in Goldman Sachs. According to the Wall Street Journal, Lloyd Blankfein, David Viniar, and Michael Sherwood were involved in the talks. They supposedly offered $5 billion in preferred shares for an additional investment of $3.7 billion from the Libyan dictator.
Had the deal gone through, Libya would have become one of the largest shareholders in Goldman Sachs.
It's funny, but I seem to remember the SEC taking a pretty dim view of a bank or broker rebating client losses. I'll admit, it's been 20 years since I sat for my Series 7, but I seem to recall that being...oh, I don't know...illegal? Of course, Goldman could always say that one thing didn't have anything to do with the other, but even my monkey math calculates that a $1.3 billion loss combined with an additional $3.7 billion investment comes pretty close to $5 billion.
But no matter. The deal didn't happen. So at least poor Lucas doesn't have to explain that.
Too bad for Gaddafi, though. Lord knows he could use the exit ops right now.
I think people are looking at this the wrong way. Goldman lost a billion bucks for this nutjob? Clearly another bullet point in the case that GS is a part of the US government. Working to dethrone the guy buy making him go broke one 'bad' trade at a time.
lol gold +1
Maybe the DOD should ask Goldman about how to screw China in case we ever go to war with them. I'm sure the Goldies can find a way to financially ruin China.
Losing terrorist state money = doing God's work
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