Courtesy of Pam Martens.
John Paulson, Hedge Fund Manager, Is Praised in the 2010 Spring/Summer Issue of the Alumni Magazine of the Stern School of Business
If you are not yet sufficiently repulsed by the billionaire class in New York City riding roughshod over the most basic rules of ethical conduct, consider what just happened at AIG – the too-big-to-fail insurance company that was bailed out by the taxpayer during the 2008 crisis to the eventual tune of a $182 billion commitment, while its Board had the gall to pay multi-million dollar bonuses to its disgraced executives. AIG also used its bailout money to make multi-billion dollar backdoor payments to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks for credit default swap bets they had made, which AIG had insured, on dodgy subprime mortgage products.
AIG’s Board of Directors just appointed hedge fund titan, John Paulson of Paulson & Company, to its Board – despite the fact that he is named in a SEC complaint as a willful participant in the disgraceful Goldman Sachs deal that was designed to rip off investors while financially lining the pockets of Paulson and Goldman Sachs. While Paulson was not charged by the SEC, its complaint made clear he played a key role and profited greatly to the detriment of misled investors.
Adding to the outrage of this AIG Board appointment, not one major newspaper that we could find thought it was relevant to mention Paulson’s past transgressions in reporting on his Board appointment.
The SEC had this to say about Paulson’s ethics in its April 16, 2010 announcement of charges against Goldman Sachs in the now infamous 2007 ABACUS deal:
“The SEC alleges that one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Paulson & Co., paid Goldman Sachs to structure a transaction in which Paulson & Co. could take short positions against mortgage securities chosen by Paulson & Co. based on a belief that the securities would experience credit events.”
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