Goldman Sachs said today that the SEC investigation into questionable practices surrounding the Abacus derivatives offering, is based on the actions of a single employee. To bolster its claim, Goldman pulled the trading license of Fabrice Touree, a Goldman executive working out of its London office, and placed him on paid leave.
“It’s all going to be a factual dispute about what he remembers and what the other folks remember on the other side,” Greg Palm, Goldman Sachs’s co-general counsel, said in a call with reporters yesterday, without naming Tourre. “If we had evidence that someone here was trying to mislead someone, that’s not something we’d condone at all and we’d be the first one to take action.”