Goldman Sachs cooperating with government probes on SVB collapse
10:17 am Thursday, May 04th, 2023
(Reuters) -Goldman Sachs Group Inc said in a filing on Thursday it is cooperating with government probes into collapsed Silicon Valley Bank.
The Wall Street bank is “cooperating with and providing information to various governmental bodies in connection with their investigations and inquiries” into SVB, including the two companies’ dealings in March.
Goldman was involved in key events before SVB’s downfall in that month. The Wall Street bank acquired a bond portfolio on which SVB booked a $1.8 billion loss, a transaction that preceded a failed SVB share sale where Goldman was an underwriter.
Goldman was also among the underwriters named as defendants in a securities class action lawsuit related to several SVB share offerings in 2021 and 2022, it said in a regulatory filing.
The plaintiffs allege offer documents contained material misstatements and omissions, Goldman said in the filing. The plaintiffs seek unspecified damages in the lawsuit, which was filed on April 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
On March 17, SVB Financial Group filed for a court-supervised reorganization under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to seek buyers for its assets, days after its former unit Silicon Valley Bank was taken over by U.S. regulators.
Financial stocks have lost billions of dollars in value after the collapses of SVB and Signature Bank, which saw nervous depositors flee to larger ‘too-big-to-fail’ institutions.
(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Saeed Azhar in New York; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri and Andrea Ricci)
