(Bloomberg News) Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has sought to quell shareholder concerns about its bonuses and business practices at the past two annual meetings. Today, he will try again.
As the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets hosts investors for the first time at its building in Jersey City, New Jersey, shareholders are still questioning Goldman Sachs's actions during the financial crisis, executive pay and business model.
"They really do have to reshape the firm and get the message out there that 'Look, here's what we're going to look like going forward,'" said Peter Sorrentino, a senior portfolio manager at Huntington Asset Advisors in Cincinnati, which manages $14.8 billion, including almost 135,000 Goldman Sachs shares. "I still think we're one headline away from this stock getting clobbered."
Goldman Sachs was the most-profitable securities firm when Blankfein, 56, took the helm almost five years ago. While the company survived the financial crisis that bankrupted smaller rival Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and repaid U.S. rescue funds and Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., its practices before the crisis have remained under scrutiny.
Goldman Sachs fell $1.11 to $150.41 yesterday on the New York Stock Exchange and has dropped 10.6 percent this year, compared with a 0.6 percent gain for the 82-member Standard & Poor's 500 Financials Index and a 6.2 percent advance for the S&P 500 Index.
$550 Million Settlement
At last year's meeting, Blankfein created a business- standards committee to study the firm's practices and recommend ways they could be improved. The committee, which issued a report in January, was formed in part as a response to an April 2010 Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleging the firm misled clients about a mortgage-linked investment. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million in July to settle the suit.
The questions didn't end there. Last month the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report on the causes of the financial crisis that accused New York-based Goldman Sachs of misleading clients in its sales of mortgage securities, a charge the firm denies. The report was referred to the Justice Department and the SEC, which have said they are looking into it.
"There are still lingering problems" for Goldman Sachs, said Benjamin B. Wallace, an analyst at Westborough, Massachusetts-based Grimes & Co., which manages about $1 billion and doesn't own Goldman Sachs stock. "If the Senate and the SEC and the Department of Justice would stop investigating them they could probably put it behind them."
'Sins of the Past'
The business-standards committee was a good idea for public relations and a useful guide for future conduct, "but the problem is that does not absolve you from the sins of the past," said Huntington's Sorrentino.
"I would not at this moment say that any financial services firm, especially Goldman, who was preeminent during that whole time, is out of the woods on this," he said. "At this juncture, given the magnitude of what happened, I don't know what the time window is."