Goldman Does a Malaysia Deal

Disclosure, I used to work at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and I remain mostly favorably disposed toward the place. Partly for the reasons anyone might be fond of a former employer: I learned a lot there, I have a lot of friends who worked or still work there, I generally think that it is full of good people who try to do good work in a good way. But I also have a certain perverse aesthetic admiration for how they sometimes operate. Like even when they are doing evil, even when they are abjectly apologizing for doing evil, they do it with a certain sense of style.

So once upon a time Goldman helped an entity called 1Malaysia Development Berhad raise about $6.5 billion from bond markets, much of which was then stolen by 1MDB’s promoter, Jho Low, and used to pay for his lavish lifestyle and to bribe Malaysian government officials. Also hundreds of millions of dollars of the bond proceeds were used to pay Goldman’s fees, and hundreds of millions more were used to pay kickbacks to the Goldman partner who did the deal. Malaysia’s current government—not the one that took all the bribes—is understandably unhappy about all this, and Goldman has the deepest pockets around, and one of its former partners did help Low steal the money, so Malaysia went after Goldman to get some money back. And now it has a deal: