{"id":2135,"date":"2010-01-11T06:09:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T14:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=2135"},"modified":"2010-01-11T06:15:47","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T14:15:47","slug":"shareholders-launches-suit-against-goldman-over-bonuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/shareholders-launches-suit-against-goldman-over-bonuses\/","title":{"rendered":"Pension fund launches suit against Goldman over bonuses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Central Laborers Pension Fund, an Illinois pension, is suing Goldman Sachs over the approximately $20 billion that the firm is looking to pay out in bonuses for 2009.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.plansponsor.com\/Goldman_Sachs_Bonuses_Draw_Pension_Fund_Suit.aspx\">Their rationale<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Defendants&#8217; conduct shows that, even though Goldman is supposedly owned by public shareholders, defendants have scant regard for the interests of those shareholders.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This suit shows that the Illinois pension fund has scant regard for <a href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/echarts?s=GS#chart2:symbol=gs;range=2y;compare=iyf;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined\">the evidence to the contrary<\/a> regarding how Goldman Sachs&#8217; takes care of its shareholders.\u00a0 Before 2008, in a decade of market outperformance, the firm paid out nearly 50 percent of net revenues in a combination of cash and shares to its employees, most of it in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/forbes\/2009\/0316\/028_wall_street_deserves_bonuses.html\">so-called bonuses<\/a>.\u00a0 In 2008, when Goldman Sachs underperformed the entire financial services sector by about 10 percentage points, they paid their senior executives zero.\u00a0 In 2009, when they outperformed the financial services sector by nearly <a href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/echarts?s=GS#chart8:symbol=gs;range=20081229,20091228;compare=iyf;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on\">100 percentage points<\/a>, they intend to pay out 40 percent of net revenues in bonuses, all of it in the form of restricted shares.<\/p>\n<p>Given these facts, it&#8217;s hard to see this lawsuit as anything but a waste of money by this pension fund&#8217;s leadership, who appear to be using their pensioners&#8217; cash to indulge in political grandstanding.\u00a0 Who is breaching their fiduciary responsibility here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Central Laborers Pension Fund, an Illinois pension, is suing Goldman Sachs over the approximately $20 billion that the firm is looking to pay out in bonuses for 2009.\u00a0 Their rationale: Defendants&#8217; conduct shows that, even though Goldman is supposedly owned by public shareholders, defendants have scant regard for the interests of those shareholders. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2135"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2144,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2135\/revisions\/2144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}