It has taken 8 long years of legal pushback by Goldman Sachs for the bank to finally settle with shareholders for the damage done to them by its crooked dealings over 1MDB. Late April it was reported an accommodation has been reached which will be submitted on 20th of this month.There is no detail being given as to the size of the compensation to the plaintiffs who were led in the action by a Swedish pension fund, Sjunde AP-Fonden, (many of whose investors will not have lived to see this tardy acknowledgement of responsibility).What is clear is that the top tier of the bank, who all received record bonuses from the outrageously overpriced 1MDB bond offerings (which acted as a front for the theft of billions), will have remained financially untouched. Many of those executives had been criminally indicted by Malaysia before the charges were bought off by a relatively meagre $2.5 billion snap settlement with the Muhyiddin government, over which many questions still linger.Sarawak Report first reported exclusive details of the shareholder complaint in 2019, which gave an extraordinary insight into how those at the top, in the Management Committee of the bank, brushed aside compliance concerns and ignored not only the glaring red flags around Jho Low and the ‘guarantors’ at Abu Dhabi’s IPIC/Aabar fund, but the trenchant warnings of their more honest leading figures in Asia.In particular, David Ryan, President of Goldman Asia, had warned in advance against the second bond issue crafted by the ambitious new Head of Southeast Asia for the bank, Tim Leissner, that there was no commercial justification put forward for the borrowing and that the power purchase plans being touted could easily have been funded by the proceeds of the earlier bond issue, which did not appear to have been spent.He was not to know, unlike Leissener who was directly involved in the conspiracy, that this money had long since been stolen, but plainly he suspected it and cautioned those at the top of the bank against the lucrative proposals. However, it was Leissner who was lionised by his bosses for the record profits being made out of their brand new stamping ground of Malaysia and Ryan, his senior, who was forced out of the bank.Alex Turnbull, son of the previous Australian prime minister who also spoke out about the dodgy set up, was likewise squeezed out of Goldman Sachs. This was all during the period post-2008 and the global financial crash for which Goldman was largely responsible, after which it was supposed to have implemented far reaching compliance reforms.The lawyers for the shareholders laid out a devastating litany of irresponsible tactics in Goldman’s new stamping ground, namely ’emerging markets’. By the time the bank got stuck into its new Malaysia initiative (gaining its license from a grateful Najib in November 2009 after the bank had advised Jho Low behind the scenes on setting up 1MDB and its initial bonds) Goldman had already created outrage and provoked an angry lawsuit over its deception of the Libyan Investment Authority from which the bank had walked away with a fortune.It was the same Andrea Vella responsible for that scandal who then acted as Leissner’s line manager, protector and confidant over 1MDB. He and expensive lawyers would succeed in persuading a London judge (but few others) of his innocence in the Libyan affair and was only finally ‘let go’ by Goldman Sachs in 2020 having been banned from banking by the Federal Reserve in the light of his 1MDB record.The shareholder plaintiffs rightly pointed to this toxic cocktail of a red flagged non-transparent bond issue, guided through by a banker whose record was being challenged by another emerging country’s sovereign fund on behalf of a second such fund plainly advised by a known fraudster.The penalties eventually heaped on the bank were foreseeable owing to such negligence, fraud and greed, said the shareholders. New post-transaction monitoring rules which the President of the bank, Gary Cohn had assured them were being implemented should have alerted the bank exactly where the money had gone, namely into a set of fraudulent off-shore mirror companies set up by the conspirators at 1MDB and Aabar.The bankers at Goldman’s New York HQ, who met with Najib and Jho Low, clearly decided to engage in all this lucrative purloining of Malaysia’s public money based on a crooked calculation that Najib Razak had such a grip on his country and control over its public money that the billions stolen could be massaged away through a planned ‘floatation’ of 1MDB’s valueless shares which Najib would ensure would be bought up by pension funds and other public savings bodies.Then they partied at the Hamptons on the proceeds of the money stolen from poor honest Malaysian public servants and others whose finances were controlled by Malaysia’s crooked prime minister.The only reason Goldman have now finally settled, having tried every legal manoeuvre to deter the plaintiffs, is because they could not afford to have the appalling allegations laid out in this indictment aired in court in a case they would likely lose.Read about the contents of the case the bank had to run away from in the original Sarawak Report articles based on the case filed in 2019.https://sarawakreport.org/2019/11/goldman-sachs-lied-and-denied-over-1mdbs-billion-dollar-thefts/https://www.sarawakreport.org/2019/11/devastating-indictment-by-goldman-shareholders-raises-pressure-on-top-dogs-at-worlds-most-powerful-bank-exclusive-report/