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Paul Gambles

Recognized as a regional financial expert, Paul is a regular speaker at industry events on market forecasting, financial planning, investing and legal issues for foreigners living or doing business in Asia.  Besides Paul’s blog, Paul previously distributed his ‘almost-daily’ email – “Daily Updates”, where he gave his views on timely issues affecting financial markets, macro economics, micro economics and everything in-between.

Born in South Yorkshire, England, Paul graduated from the University of Warwick with an Honours degree in English and European Studies.  He began his financial career in the early 1980s as a technical inspector at HMIT with Inland Revenue.  Following a successful career change to the Bank of Scotland in 1987, Paul moved to Bangkok in 1994 to help set-up an investment counseling practice, which today is known as MBMG International.

www.mbmg-international.com

  

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28 July 2010

Goldman Sachs

One of the great things about Goldman Sachs is that they always seem to be able to find new ways to show their utter contempt for their counterparties, clients, competitors, regulators and just about everyone who isn’t “very Goldman Sachs”. Recently Nicholas Paler wrote in Citywire that Goldman Sachs has been issued with a subpoena after being accused of failing to work with the US government's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC):-

“The FCIC said Goldman 'deliberately and disruptively' refused to work with it, after failing to provide documents and people for interviews in a timely manner.”

Paler reports that according to the Daily Telegraph, Goldman Sachs is said to have taken part in 'mischief-making' after handing in 20 million separate documents in response to demands for information. The FCIC could not possibly cope with that amount of information given it has a staff of 50 and an end of year investigation deadline.

“Phil Angelides, chairman of the FCIC - which has given the task of finding the root causes of the financial crisis by the US Congress in an effort to prevent it happening again - said Goldmans was deliberately trying to drag out the proceedings in order to avoid punishment.
Angelides said yesterday that the bank is involved in 'a very deliberate effort to run out the clock'.”

This of course offer Goldman committed ‘civil fraud’ by selling Abacus - a mortgage-backed security - to investors without telling them hedge fund Paulson & Co was shorting the instrument. It is also accused of failing to reveal it allowed Paulson to select many of the securities held in Abacus.

Just when you think that they can’t take the moral bar any lower, Goldman Sachs show the full depths of their creativity once more