Goldman Sachs Finds New And Inventive Way To Continue Ruining Sergey Aleynikov's Life
He's no longer an employee so docking his pay or firing him his out. He's already spent a year in prison for charges that has now been thrown out twice. Ooo, what about refusing to pay his $3 million legal fees on the claim that the title of "vice-president" essentially means glorified analyst, and glorified analysts don't get their bills paid by the bank, even though 1) It will make a lot of VPs feel really bad about themselves and 2) The bank has in fact paid the legal fees of VPs in the past?
Goldman Sachs says Aleynikov, whose saga helped inspire Michael Lewis’s book “Flash Boys,” was a VP in name only and isn’t entitled to perks for true corporate officers, such as covering lawyers’ bills. Aleynikov’s attorneys say corporate titles carry their own weight and can’t be devalued at the bank’s whim. In the latest courtroom brawl between Goldman Sachs and the twice-vindicated Aleynikov, a Delaware Chancery Court judge on Thursday will parse the firm’s bylaws to decide if the bank can pick and choose who deserves corporate-officer status...Aleynikov’s lawyers have argued that Goldman Sachs has paid the legal fees of 51 of 53 employees who requested it, including 15 who were vice presidents. Among them was Fabrice Tourre, an ex-vice president nicknamed “the Fabulous Fab” who was found liable in 2013 for defrauding investors in deals involving mortgage-backed securities...The bank’s lawyers will seek to convince Judge Travis Laster that Wall Street firms have handed out vice presidencies freely, Aleynikov’s lawyers wrote in a summary of testimony by Goldman Sachs’s expert. That practice has served to devalue the title and created higher standards for corporate-officer status, according to the summary. Many of the bank’s court filings are sealed. “As a result of title inflation, there are many vice presidents” within Goldman Sachs, and only a handful of senior executives qualify as corporate officers, the bank’s expert said, according to the summary.
Goldman-Aleynikov Fee Fight Turns On Wall Street VP Inflation [Bloomberg]