Skip to main content

Goldman Sachs Wins a Victory in London

Image result for goldman sachs london


In a London courtroom on Friday, October 14, a judge found for Goldman Sachs in a much watched case that pitted that notorious investment bank against late Qaddafi and post-Qaddafi Libya.

Here's a Dealbook story on the ruling.

Here's the first 120 pages of the decision by Judge Vivien Rose.

The roots of the case go back well before the revolution in Libya in 2011, and before the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The roots of it go back to the period 2003-04 when the western industrialized countries began lifting their sanctions against Libya, became willing to buy its oil and accept its money in their banking institution's coffers. In this period, Libya created the Libya Investment Authority (LIA), a sovereign wealth fund.

Goldman Sachs was one of many institutions that, in Judge Rose's words, "beat a path to the door" of the LIA with bright ideas as to how it should invest that money,

The LIA in this litigation has portrayed itself as a bunch of hayseeds, unused to the ways of the wicked financial world, trying to get into the swing of things, and naively trusty of the suggestions of Goldman Sachs.  Thus, LIA has contested certain trades executed in the first four months of 2008, asking that Goldman Sachs be required to make them whole for their losses in these trades.

A related consideration, Haitem Zarti, the younger brother of a key decision-maker in the LIA, received a coveted internship at Goldman Sachs just as the LIA was about to sign off on certain equity derivatives deals.

The court refused to accept that account of what happened. They were not the easily wined-and-dined hayseeds that they make themselves out to have been, and there was no quid pro quo involving Mr Zarti.

Rose heard all the evidence and I didn't. I won't second guess her. But I'm sure the historians of posterity will have work to do. Doctoral dissertations must be in the works already.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...