Blankfein Lawyers Up
August 23rd, 2011Luxury residence overlooking Central Park: $26 Million
U.S. Taxpayer Bailout of Goldman Sachs: $10 Billion
Criminal Defense Team Used by the Worst Corporate Scumbags: Priceless. (Or maybe just expensive, given the track record.)
Via: Daily Beast:
On Monday, Goldman shares took a 6 percent beating during final and extended trading hours on the announcement that Blankfein had hired a lawyer, without waiting for specifics. The last time its shares hit a 106.51 level was in early 2009.
…
You could look at Blankfein hiring external counsel as a normal prudent, legal move. But that’s naive, given the attorney he selected. Hiring a major criminal-defense lawyer is about more than the fear of a $550 million SEC wrist slap for bad documentation in the Abacus CDO. It’s about the real possibility of doing time.
Big-shot Washington defense attorney Reid Weingarten, of the firm Steptoe & Johnson LLC, has represented former Enron chief accounting officer Richard Causey (who pleaded out), former Rite Aid vice chairman and chief counsel Franklin Brown (found guilty by a jury on 10 counts of conspiring to falsely inflate his company’s value), and former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers (convicted on nine felony counts by a jury). All three are in jail. Two of them, Ebbers and Causey, had undergone congressional panel investigations beforehand. Another of Weingarten’s clients, former Tyco counsel Mark Belnick, was acquitted, though Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, who was not represented by Weingarten, was convicted and remains in jail.
This is not a great pack to be associated with. The outcomes for most of these guys weren’t great either.
Research Credit: MS
