realpolitikasia: Did Goldman Sachs SSG Unit fraudulently under price 1MDB bonds? Does this explain Turnbull's refusal to investigate ANZ/AMBank

by Ganesh Sahathevan

Malcolm Turnbull when he was chairman at Goldman Sachs. Now he runs the country.

First ,from Zerohedge, quoting Bloomberg:

Alex Turnbull, a former executive director of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s special situations group, is planning a Singapore-based hedge fund, said people with knowledge of the matter.

Turnbull, son of Australian Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, will be the chief investment officer of Keshik Capital Pte, said the people who asked not to be identified as the information is private. The fund, which will be focused on Asia with the flexibility to invest globally, may start as early as January and will invest in equity and credit, including convertible bonds, they added.

Keshik is at least the third hedge-fund startup tapping Asian opportunities in recent years involving a former member of the Goldman Sachs unit that invests in distressed debt and companies with its own capital. The Special Situations Group, known as SSG, is part of Goldman Sachs’s investing and lending operation, which generated $4.3 billion of pretax earnings last year(2013), the most of the New York-based bank’s four business segments.

His reward: starting "his" own hedge fund, Keshik Capital, at the ripe old age of about 31, not even a decade out of college.

Now see :
The Wall Street bank helped 1MDB, which was founded by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in September 2009, raise $6.5 billion in three bond sales in 2012 and 2013 to invest in energy projects and real estate to boost the Malaysian economy.

Then see, from the NY Times:

Jack Blum, a lawyer who led corruption investigations for several Senate committees, said that Goldman should have done a thorough investigation of what 1MDB was doing with the money that the bank helped it raise and move around the world, especially given the history of corruption in Malaysia.

“It is a very serious problem when a company is making a hell of a lot of money out of something and everybody in the place says, ‘I don’t know about it,’” Mr. Blum said.

Mr. Blum said that assigning legal blame in situations like the 1MDB case was generally hard because it would be difficult to prove that Goldman executives knew what was going to happen with the money before it happened.

END

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