Meg Whitman has extensive links to Goldman Sachs

[Newsjock]

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

Candidate Meg Whitman touts her experience at eBay, the online auction house that made her rich, but her career and personal fortune are entwined with another company: the Goldman Sachs investment bank, a major player in public finance in the state she wants to lead.

Whitman's relationship with the giant Wall Street firm - as investor, corporate director and recipient of both insider stock deals and campaign donations - could pose conflicts of interest if the Republican front-runner is elected governor of California, critics say.

From 1998 to 2002, while she was CEO of eBay, Whitman helped steer millions of dollars of her company's investment banking business to Goldman, court records show.

In 2001, Goldman put Whitman on its corporate board, paying her an estimated $475,000 for little more than a year of part-time service. The company also gave her insider access to the initial public offerings of hot stocks worth millions, according to the records.

Whitman left the board in 2002 after she was singled out in a congressional probe of bond underwriters and "spinning" - a financial maneuver, now banned, in which Goldman and other firms allegedly traded access to hot IPOs for bond business. Whitman later settled a shareholder lawsuit related to profits she and other execs made from buying the IPOs.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/11/MNAP1CSBOD.DTL&tsp=1

[Mari333]

1. hell, Goldman Sachs runs this country, watch Michael Moore's new film

[still_one]

2. I think you would be hard pressed to not find any politician linked to goldman in some way /nt