A former Goldman Sachs trader nicknamed “Fabulous Fab” has been found liable of six fraud claims in one of the most high-profile cases related to the credit crunch.
Fabrice Tourre was described by the face of “Wall Street greed” by Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers during a civil case brought by federal regulators in response to the 2007 mortgage crisis.
A New York City jury found Tourre guilty of six out of seven of the SEC fraud claims. He faces potential fines and a possible ban from the financial industry. The exact punishment will be determined at a later hearing.
The SEC had accused Tourre of misleading investors about sub-prime mortgage securities that he knew were doomed to fail. That allowed a Goldman Sachs client, Paulson & Co, to secretly bet against the investment.
The manoeuvre ended up making $1bn for Paulson and Co and its wealthy president, John A Paulson, and millions of dollars in fees for Goldman. The SEC also sought to show that it helped earn Tourre a bonus that boosted his salary to $1.7 million in 2007.
“We are gratified by the jury’s verdict,” said Andrew Ceresney, co-director of the SEC’s enforcement division. “We will continue to vigorously seek to hold accountable, and bring to trial when necessary, those who commit fraud on Wall Street.”
The SEC alleged that Tourre, 34, used a product known as Abacus 2007-AC1 to mislead investors. The regulator alleged that he failed to declare that Paulson had helped choose, and intended to bet against, mortgage securities underlying the 2007 deal.
Torre, a mid-level executive at Goldman Sachs, was the only individual ever charged in relation to Abacus. Goldman Sachs escaped with a then-record $550m fine to settle SEC charges in 2010, without admitting or denying guilt.
During the trial SEC lawyers confronted Tourre with a January 2007 email in which the SEC said Tourre had deliberately misled another institutional investor about Paulson’s position in the investment.
Asked repeatedly if the information in the email was “false,” Tourre responded: “It was not accurate.”
He added: “I wasn’t trying to confuse anybody; it just wasn’t accurate at the time.”
SEC lawyer Matthew Martens told the jury that Tourre’s testimony had been “imaginary, unreal, dreamlike” and accused the trader of living “in a fantasy world”.
Tourre’s lawyer said the investment’s failure should be put in the perspective of a turbulent economy. He noted that similarly packaged securities “went off the cliff as well” after 2007.
Some of the testimony centred on personal emails sent by Tourre, who grew up in France and moved to the US in 2000 to study at Sanford, to his girlfriend back in Europe. In the email, sent as the markets teetered on the edge of panic, Toure referred to himself using the nickname “Fabulous Fab”. The moniker leant itself to the idea of corporate greed and vanity running riot at a time when investors were losing savings.
“The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstruosities [sic]!!!” Tourre wrote.
Other messages noted that a friend had given Tourre the nickname, despite him saying there was “nothing fabulous about me”.
The civil case had been called the most significant legal action related to the mortgage securities meltdown, but the Associated Press reported that it lacked the drama and high stakes of white-collar criminal cases.
Much of the testimony was devoted to the intricacies of synthetic collateralised debt obligations, or CDOs a complex type of investment central to the case, the Associated Press said.
Tourre left court without talking to reporters.
The Associated Press in New York contributed to this report
Until 2010, few people had heard of Fabrice Tourre but from the moment Goldman Sachs released some of his emails in connection with a US Senate investigation into the causes of the financial crisis, the French-born trader became famous as “Fabulous Fab”.
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal before yesterday’s verdict, the 34-year-old had conceded he would never shake the image. “You cannot erase Google searches,” he said. “You will forever get the same articles, forever get the fabulous Fab.”
Called to appear before the Senate for its investigation in April 2010, Tourre rebutted “unfounded attacks” on his character. “I firmly believe that my conduct was correct,” he told the hearing – although he did admit errors of judgment in the infamous emails that appeared to demean his work at Goldman. “They reflect very bad on the firm and myself. I wish I hadn’t sent them.”
An email sent in March 2007 referred to the financial products he worked on as “pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: ‘Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?'”
Tourre joined Goldman in New York in 2001 and worked his way up to vice-president on the structured product trading desk, where he helped create the Abacus 2007-AC1 CDO, packed with toxic sub-prime mortgages. He moved to London in late 2008 and became an executive director, a title that belied his relatively junior position in the bank.
Staff and agencies
