1MDB
Corruption, scandal, bribery
One of my favourite French translations is “pot de vin” for bribe.
In the 1MDB case, the bribes amounted to one billion dollars- do we need a new phrase here, wine-lake, wine-ocean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_lake
How can you bribe someone a billion dollars? How can you hope to make a profit after paying out that sort of bribe?
I suppose we’ll have to ask Goldman Sachs for the answer.
Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay nearly $3bn (£2.3bn) to end a probe of its role in the 1MDB corruption scandal.
The bank's Malaysian subsidiary also admitted in US court that it had paid more than $1bn in bribes to win work raising money for the Malaysian state-owned wealth fund.
US officials said the record settlement reflected Goldman's "central" role in a "massive corruption scheme".
Goldman admitted it had fallen "short", calling it an "institutional failure".
In all, the investment bank is due to pay about $5bn in penalties - about two thirds of its 2019 profits - to regulators around the world, including in the UK, to resolve cases that have severely tarnished the firm's reputation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54597256
The problem is that these cases are horrendously difficult to prove. When Goldman made a group of toxic mortgage funds (sorry, mortgage-backed securities) for AIG, should they have told AIG that they were working on behalf of John Paulson?
https://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-123.htm
Was Fabrice Tourre solely responsible for the Abacus fund or were others also guilty?
https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/fabrice-tourre
Surely part of the problem is tax havens- if you’re allowing funds based in the Cayman islands to invest, you haven’t really got any controls against money laundering. And now with SPACs, the fun starts all over again.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/15/investing/arnault-mustier-spac-tikehau-capital/index.html
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/financial-devils-dictionary-spac?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxODIyNjQ0MCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MzI4MDk5MzYsIl8iOiJwQ05NcCIsImlhdCI6MTYxNDU0MDU0NCwiZXhwIjoxNjE0NTQ0MTQ0LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItMTA0MiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.pig3b6MhgjRFcjWJUpceTcqRJ-Vm2NzCQGyPgR7gGfE
Great piece from Private Eye about corruption.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/tax-havens
