Month: November 2020

In the spring of 2012, a senior examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York determined that Goldman Sachs had a problem.

Under a Fed mandate, the investment banking behemoth was expected to have a company-wide policy to address conflicts of interest in how its phalanxes of dealmakers handled clients. Although Goldman had a patchwork of policies, the examiner concluded that they fell short of the Fed’s requirements.

That finding by the examiner, Carmen Segarra, potentially had serious implications for Goldman, which was already under fire for advising clients on both sides of several multibillion-dollar deals and allegedly putting the bank’s own interests above those of its customers. It could have led to closer scrutiny of Goldman by regulators or changes to its business practices.

Before she could formalize her findings, Segarra said, the senior New York Fed official who oversees Goldman pressured her to change them. When she refused, Segarra said she was called to a meeting where her bosses told her they no longer trusted her judgment. Her phone was confiscated, and security officers marched her out of the Fed’s fortress-like building in lower Manhattan, just 7 months after being hired.

“They wanted me to falsify my findings,” Segarra said in a recent interview, “and when I wouldn’t, they fired me.”

Today, Segarra filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the New York Fed in federal court in Manhattan seeking reinstatement and damages. The case provides a detailed look at a key aspect of the post-2008 financial reforms: The work of Fed bank examiners sent to scrutinize the nation’s “Too Big to Fail” institutions.

In hours of interviews with ProPublica, the 41-year-old lawyer gave a detailed account of the events that preceded her dismissal and provided numerous documents, meeting minutes and contemporaneous notes that support her claims. Rarely do outsiders get such a candid view of the Fed’s internal operations.

Segarra is an expert in legal and regulatory compliance whose previous work included jobs at Citigroup and the French bank Société Générale. She was part of a wave of new examiners hired by the New York Fed to monitor systemically important banks after passage in July 2010 of the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, which gave the Fed new oversight responsibilities.

Goldman is known for having close ties with the New York Fed, its primary regulator. The current president of the New York Fed, William Dudley, is a former Goldman partner. One of his New York Fed predecessors, E. Gerald Corrigan, is currently a top executive at Goldman. At the time of Segarra’s firing, Stephen Friedman, a former chairman of the New York Fed, was head of the risk committee for Goldman’s board of directors.

In an email, spokesman Jack Gutt said the New York Fed could not respond to detailed questions out of privacy considerations and because supervisory matters  are confidential. Gutt said the Fed provides “multiple venues and layers of recourse for employees to freely express concerns about the institutions it supervises.”

“Such concerns are treated seriously and investigated appropriately with a high degree of independence,” he said. “Personnel decisions at the New York Fed are based exclusively on individual job performance and are subject to thorough review. We categorically reject any suggestions to the contrary.”

Dudley would not have been involved in the firing, although he might have been informed after the fact, according to a Fed spokesman.

Goldman also declined to respond to detailed questions about Segarra. A spokesman said the bank cannot discuss confidential supervisory matters. He said Goldman “has a comprehensive approach to addressing conflicts through firm-wide and divisional policies and infrastructure” and pointed to a bank document that says Goldman took recent steps to improve management of conflicts.

Segarra’s termination has not been made public before now. She was specifically assigned to assess Goldman’s conflict-of-interest policies and took a close look at several deals, including a 2012 merger between two energy companies: El Paso Corp. and Kinder Morgan. Goldman had a $4 billion stake in Kinder Morgan while also advising El Paso on the $23 billion deal.

Segarra said she discovered previously unreported deficiencies in Goldman’s efforts to deal with its conflicts, which were also criticized by the judge presiding over a shareholder lawsuit concerning the merger.

Her lawsuit also alleges that she uncovered evidence that Goldman falsely claimed that the New York Fed had signed off on a transaction with Santander, the Spanish bank, when it had not. A supervisor ordered her not to discuss the Santander matter, the lawsuit says, allegedly telling Segarra it was “for your protection.”

‘Eyes Like Saucers’

The New York Fed is one of 12 regional quasi-private reserve banks. By virtue of its location, it supervises some of the nation’s most complex and important financial institutions. After the 2008 financial crisis, disparate voices pointed to failures of enforcement by the New York Fed as a key reason banks took on too much risk.

Even Fed officials acknowledged shortcomings. After Dodd-Frank, new examiners like Segarra, called “risk specialists,” were hired for their expertise. They were in addition to other Fed staffers, dubbed “business line specialists,” some of whom were already embedded at the banks.

Segarra believed she had found the perfect home when she joined the New York Fed’s legal and compliance risk specialist team in October 2011. It was a prestigious job, insulated from business cycles, where she could do her part to prevent another financial meltdown. Her skills, honed at Harvard, Cornell Law School and the banks where she had worked, consisted of helping to create the policies and procedures needed to meet government financial regulations.

As part of their first assignment, Fed officials told Segarra’s group of risk specialists to examine how the banks in which they were stationed complied with a Fed Supervision and Regulation Letter issued in 2008.

The letter, known as SR 08-08, emphasizes the importance of having company-wide programs to manage risks at firms like Goldman, which engage in diverse lines of business, from private wealth management and trading to mergers and acquisitions. The programs are supposed to be monitored and tested by bank compliance employees to make sure they are working as intended.

“The Fed recognized that financial conglomerates should act like truly combined entities rather than separate divisions or entities where one group has no idea what the other group is doing,” said Christopher Laursen, an economic consultant and former Federal Reserve employee who helped draft the supervisory letter.

In 2009, a review by the Fed had found problems with its efforts to ensure that banks followed the policy, which also says that bank compliance staffers must “be appropriately independent of the business lines” they oversee.

Segarra’s team included examiners placed at nine other “Too Big to Fail” banks, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Barclays.

Segarra said her bosses told her to focus on Goldman’s conflict-of-interest policies. The firm had long been famous for trying to corral business from every part of the deals it worked on. “If you have a conflict, we have an interest,” is an oft-told joke on Wall Street about the firm’s approach.

The year before Segarra joined the Fed, for instance, Goldman had received a drubbing from the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Senate subcommittee over conflicts related to Abacus, a mortgage transaction the bank constructed. The SEC imposed a $550 million fine on the bank for the deal. A January 2011 Goldman report concluded that the firm should “review and update conflicts-related policies and procedures, as appropriate.”

Initial meetings between the New York Fed and Goldman executives to review the bank’s policies did not go well, said Segarra, who kept detailed minutes.

When the examiners asked in November 2011 to see the conflict-of-interest policy, they were told one didn’t exist, according to the minutes. “It’s probably more than one document — there is no one policy per se,” the minutes recount one Goldman executive as saying.

The discussion turned to the name of the group that oversaw conflicts at Goldman: “Business Selection and Conflicts Resolution Group.” Segarra’s supervisor, Johnathon Kim, asked if business selection and conflicts were, in fact, two different groups. He was told they were not, the minutes show.

Goldman officials stated that the bank did not have a company-wide conflict-of-interest program, Segarra’s minutes show. Moreover, the head of the business selection and conflicts group, Gwen Libstag, who is not a lawyer, said in a subsequent meeting on Dec. 8 that she did not consider what her staff did a “legal and compliance function,” according to Segarra’s minutes.

“That’s why it’s called business selection,” another Goldman executive added. “They do both.”

Given the Fed’s requirements, the regulators were stunned, Segarra recounted in an interview. “Our eyes were open like saucers,” she said. “Business selection is about how you get the deal done. Conflicts of interest acknowledge that there are deals you cannot do.”

After the Dec. 8 meeting, the New York Fed’s senior supervising officer at Goldman, Michael Silva, called an impromptu session with Fed staffers, including Segarra. Silva said he was worried that Goldman was not managing conflicts well and that if the extent of the problem became public, clients might abandon the firm and cause serious financial damage, according to Segarra’s contemporaneous notes.

A Chinese Wall In Their Heads

As part of her examination, Segarra began making document requests. The goal was to determine what policies Goldman had in place and to see how they functioned in Kinder Morgan’s acquisition of El Paso. The merger was in the news after some El Paso shareholders filed a lawsuit claiming they weren’t getting a fair deal.

Although Segarra reported directly to Kim, she also had to keep Silva abreast of her examinations. Silva, who is also a lawyer, had been at the Fed for 20 years and previously had served as a senior vice president and chief of staff for Timothy Geithner while he was New York Fed president. As a senior vice president and senior supervisor, Silva outranked Kim in the Fed hierarchy.

Segarra said James Bergin, then head of the New York Fed’s legal and compliance examiners, noted at a November meeting that there was tension between the new risk specialists and old-guard supervisors at the banks. Segarra said the tension surfaced when she was approached in late December by a Fed business line specialist for Goldman, who wanted to change Segarra’s Dec. 8 meeting minutes.

Segarra told her Fed colleague that she could send any changes to her. When Segarra next met with her fellow risk specialists, she said she told them what had transpired. They told her that nobody should be allowed to change her meeting minutes because they were the evidence for her examination.

Around that time, Silva had a meeting with Segarra, she said. According to her notes, Silva warned her that sometimes new examiners didn’t recognize how they are perceived and that those who are taken most seriously are the most quiet. Segarra took it as more evidence of tension between the two groups of regulators.