Are you one?” The answer from lanky, blue-eyed Mr Leissner seemed clear from his earliest years at the firm. Proximity to power is so prized at Goldman Sachs that a former co-head wrote it into his commandments for the firm: “Important people like to deal with other important people. Mr Edward Naylor, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment. Mr Leissner’s lawyer, Jonathan Cogan, didn’t respond to messages. “He’s the type of person that I would honestly tell you I would really want as a friend, a personal friend.” “He has to know a lot of people, that’s just the nature of the business,” said Mr Gerry David, president of Celsius Holdings, an energy-drink company that counts Leissner and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing as investors. But if his links to the rich and powerful fueled his Goldman career, they also helped end it. It took only a few years before the networking maestro was helping the bank soar in Southeast Asia - culminating in billion-dollar deals with state fund 1Malaysia Development, also known as 1MDB. In 2002, when the firm made him head of investment banking in Singapore, it had just cleaned up a mess there after offending powerful families. Mr Leissner’s rise and fall shows how lucrative and fraught it can be when the bank exports that recipe worldwide. Mr Leissner, the firm’s Southeast Asia chairman, left last month after questions about the fund, his work on an Indonesian mining deal and an allegedly inaccurate reference letter.įew corporations have mastered the mix of money and power like New York-based Goldman Sachs, whose alumni have become US lawmakers, Treasury secretaries and central bankers. The windfall triggered turmoil for him, investigations into the state fund he oversees and trouble for Goldman Sachs, which helped it raise US$6.5 billion. At least US$681 million (S$920 million) landed in the prime minister’s personal bank accounts that year, money his government has said was a gift from the Saudi royal family. In snapshots she posted to Twitter, she’s sitting next to Mr Najib’s wife, and then standing between him and Mr Leissner. Mr Tim Leissner, one of Goldman Sachs Group’s star bankers, enjoyed the festivities that night with model Kimora Lee Simmons, who’s now his wife. “But certainly we can achieve a more equitable society.” “We cannot have an egalitarian society - it’s impossible to have an egalitarian society,” Mr Najib Razak said. KUALA LUMPUR - The prime minister of Malaysia had a message for the crowd at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco in September 2013.
0 kommentar(er)
