
Goldman Legal Woes Mount as Malaysia Slaps First Criminal Charge - kimsk112
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-17/malaysia-files-criminal-charges-against-goldman-its-employees
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ralph84
Malaysia does what the US should have done 10 years ago.

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pkaye
The former Malaysian PM is one of those who stole the money though.

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mynameisvlad
He's the _former_ Malaysian PM. This is a policy enacted by the _current_
Malaysian PM. How does the previous administration's actions impact what the
current one is doing or what the US should be doing, which is what the parent
comment is talking about?

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slaymaker1907
I think the point is that Malaysia had some bad apples as well so it’s not
fair to blame all of Goldman Sachs until it is known how far reaching this
matter actually was.

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ReptileMan
Strongly recommend Billion Dollar Whale on the 1MDB ... Amazing and extremely
entertaining book. They literally stole 16 billion usd.

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kyrra
Not sure if the book covered it, but WSJ had a piece that told the story of
some of that money being used to pay for some of the most expensive birthday
parties ever in Vegas.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-billion-dollar-mystery-
man-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-billion-dollar-mystery-man-and-the-
wildest-party-vegas-ever-saw-1536984061)

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natechols
Those are the authors of the book, and I think that's what became the first
chapter.

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empath75
Regardless of whether or not they're convicted -- what country would ever
entrust their sovereign wealth fund with Goldman Sachs at this point?

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TuringNYC
Clients have short term memories. After all blowback from 2000-2002 and then
2006-2008, i thought, for sure, no one would do business with many of these
firms. But memories are short lived.

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cm2187
One thing to keep in mind is that after the crisis, a lot of banks scaled back
(or were forced to scale back). Lots of banks exited the investment banking
market, leaving the incumbants between them. Clients probably didn't have that
much of a choice.

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gammateam
> "If the outcome of the case results in a criminal conviction against the
> bank, there are potentially severe reputational and financial risks to the
> bank, as well as the bank’s standing as a licensed financial institution
> with regulators worldwide."

Anybody have any insight into what these consequences realistically are?

Malaysia is an irrelevant market to a global investment bank, or it can be.
This is precisely why even the LARGEST governments of single markets don't do
this specific thing.

Malaysia's super-damning criminal charges are just fines. Goldman not paying
this out already is just because:

A) Its a larger fine than a market of that size can normally get kickbacked

B) They want to change the semantical definition of the criminal charge, to
civil one and whatever the "due process" version of a legal kickback is called
in that country, without admitting or denying anything

Everyone knows these are racketeers, does admitting a criminal in an
irrelevant country change that? Does "denying but paying off" a criminal
charge in an irrelevant country change that?

[https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/goldman-
sa...](https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/goldman-sachs)

Goldman has paid $9,602,492,860 since the year 2000 to various US financial
regulators and has suffered no reputational effect while subsequently: losing
all of Libya's money in a fund created basically the day after sanctions got
lifted. Winning the Malaysia government's business and losing that money too.

The only difference is that this time we aren't changing the regime of
Malaysia, so answer me this, does it really matter for Goldman?

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lordnacho
> has suffered no reputational effect

Well there's no objective way to measure this, but my sense is they've fallen
a hell of a long way in terms of rep from when they were a partnership just
under 20 years ago.

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gammateam
Their ability to obtain and create the best deal flow undermines this.

People want this, and this is greater than arbitrary versions of righteous
punishment that people want to happen.

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hristov
Somebody has to make a movie about this whole story and entitle it "The Real
Wolf of Wall Street"

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howlingfantods
The rights to the book Million Dollar Whale, which describes this story, has
already been picked up.

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rajacombinator
They are more likely to experience a “regime change” than to get anything
meaningful to stick against GS...

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onetimemanytime
You know why the Malaysian pols do it? Because their predecessors did and no
one went to jail. Arrogance...if they had stolen discretely, and spread the
stolen cash around--as it is always done in those parts--they'd be enjoying
their money. G R E E D, they pushed the envelope a bit too much. Stay off the
f*cking radar Johhny or they'll start asking questions, billion dollars ones.

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taf2
or maybe something more like:

Peter Gibbons: [Explaining the plan] Alright so when the sub routine compounds
the interest is uses all these extra decimal places that just get rounded off.
So we simplified the whole thing, we rounded them all down, drop the remainder
into an account we opened.

Joanna: [Confused] So you're stealing?

Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's uh
it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time
they add up to a lot.

Joanna: Oh okay. So you're gonna be making a lot of money, right?

see:
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Office_Space](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Office_Space)

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philip1209
I wonder if Malaysia will try to arrest a Goldman exec in a foreign country
and extradite them. The US has set such a scary precedent with the Huawei
case.

(What I'm referencing: [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/11/business/huawei-
cfo-arres...](https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/11/business/huawei-cfo-arrest-
details/index.html))

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jeron
usually extradition with regards to the US works one way, not the other

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hackeraccount
Ha ha.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition)

