Rule #1 When You’re An Executive Targeted by the Feds: Don’t Trust Your Company — Ask Fabrice Tourre of Goldman Sachs

As Goldman Sachs executives go under the investigative knife (with the requisite and repeated improper public disclosures of private inquiries, a common phenomenon with a Department of Justice that doesn’t even live by its own rules), they have already made one critical error: trusting the company they work for.

As reported today in Bloomberg News, the 31 year old banker “at the center” of the inquiry, Fabrice Tourre, faces increased scrutiny from criminal investigators due to his sworn and public comments concerning the matter. As another former prosecutor admits, doing what Tourre has done — comment publicly and under oath about the facts of the case — has already and will “seriously curtail” the ability for Tourre to even “find running room” to defend himself against future criminal charges. So why did he do it?

Well, as the article discloses from someone “with direct knowledge of the firm’s defense”, this was exactly Goldman Sachs’ strategy — sucker its employees into locking themselves into a corner so the company can cut bait and limit their own risk at the employee’s expense. Think being a banker at the world’s most prominent firm protects you? Not when it’s the firm whose neck’s on the line. According to the article, “part of Goldman Sachs strategy” was to prevent Tourre from being able to “negotiate a lesser penalty with the SEC in return for information that could be damaging to the firm” and prevent his further explanations of what took place by “locking in testimony” from him under oath. In the parlance of the streets — stick Tourre under the grand jury bus to be run over when the bus comes a rollin’.

How much you wanna bet the lawyers Tourre has were recommended to him by Goldman Sachs?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avI7OhdudjWc&pos=1