Tourre testified about the Abacus deal before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in April 2010 alongside other Goldman Sachs executives. The firm, which is paying Tourre’s legal fees, settled SEC allegations for $550 million in July 2010, a record at the time. In the settlement, Goldman Sachs acknowledged that marketing materials for Abacus contained “incomplete information.”

More ‘Bigwigs’

No senior Goldman Sachs executives were questioned in the trial. Defense lawyers decided not to call Paulson, the billionaire who runs Paulson & Co., to the stand after saying they planned to do so.

“I, like most of the public, wanted to hear from more Wall Street bigwigs to justify what happened with Abacus,” Anthony Sabino, who teaches law at St. John’s University in New York, said in an e-mail.

The allegations against Goldman Sachs over Abacus helped spur Congress in 2010 to enact the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which aimed at reforming the financial system and averting future crises.

Trial Defeat

In addition to the settlement with Goldman Sachs, the SEC claims it has recovered about $2.7 billion from companies and individuals in cases tied to the financial crisis. These include a $285 million settlement with Citigroup Inc., which is being appealed. The SEC suffered a trial defeat last year against Brian Stoker, the former head of Citigroup Inc.’s CDO structuring group, in the same Manhattan federal courthouse where Tourre was tried, just blocks from Wall Street.

“We will continue to vigorously seek to hold accountable, and bring to trial when necessary, those who commit fraud on Wall Street,” Andrew Ceresney, co-director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, said in a statement after the verdict.

“As shown by this verdict, we proved that Mr. Tourre, as a Goldman Sachs Vice President, put together a complicated financial product that was secretly designed to maximize the likelihood that it would fail, and marketed and sold it to investors without appropriate disclosure,” Ceresney said.

Tourre has spent part of the time since he was sued by the SEC volunteering in Rwanda and working on a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago. John “Sean” Coffey, one of Tourre’s lawyers, told jurors in closing arguments that Tourre plans to teach.