The bank has said it believed proceeds of debt sales it underwrote were for development projects and that Leissner withheld information from the firm.Low’s presence at the meeting with Blankfein, one of the most senior executives in global finance, illustrates the meteoric rise of a largely unknown financier who had managed to cultivate relationships with senior Malaysian government officials, including then-Prime Minister .By the time of the meeting, Low’s lavish spending habits were New York tabloid fodder.Starting about two months before the meeting, according to U.S. filings, Leissner and another Goldman banker began a years-long effort to bring Low aboard as a client, a request that compliance workers at the firm consistently denied.There’s no indication that Blankfein was aware of the internal assessments of Low, or knew the identities of all the people present at the meeting.The documents filed by an FBI agent in June said that evidence supports Low was present at the meeting. Goldman’s earnings from the deals have also become a sore point with the new Malaysian government, which hopes to recoup some of the money.The firm said in a quarterly filing last week that it couldn’t predict the outcome of the DOJ’s investigation, but said it could face “significant fines.”Blankfein, who stepped down as Goldman Sachs’s chief executive officer last month and still serves as chairman, said at a conference in New York last week that he’s not aware of senior managers missing red flags in the 1MDB dealings. Instead, he said, the matter was an issue of a few employees dodging bank controls and lying about it.The federal filings unsealed last week also place Najib and a “high-ranking executive” from the bank in a meeting with Leissner and Low in 2013 in New York. There’s no indication that the executive from the later meeting is the same as the one from 2009. - Bloomberg

Source: thestar November 08, 2018 21:00 UTC