Com­ment: Now that the SEC has seen fit to take Gold­man Sachs to the legal wood­shed for its actions in the sub­prime mess, it is worth not­ing that big-spend­ing GOP can­di­date for Gov­er­nor of Cal­i­for­nia Meg Whit­man is deeply tied to these SOB’s.

“Whit­man’s Ties to Finan­cial Giant Gold­man Sachs” by Lance Williams and Car­la Mar­in­uc­ci; San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle; 4/11/2010.

. . . . From 1998 to 2002, while she was CEO of eBay, Whit­man helped steer mil­lions of dol­lars of her com­pa­ny’s invest­ment bank­ing busi­ness to Gold­man, court records show.

In 2001, Gold­man put Whit­man on its cor­po­rate board, pay­ing her an esti­mat­ed $475,000 for lit­tle more than a year of part-time ser­vice. The com­pa­ny also gave her insid­er access to the ini­tial pub­lic offer­ings of hot stocks worth mil­lions, accord­ing to the records.

Whit­man left the board in 2002 after she was sin­gled out in a con­gres­sion­al probe of bond under­writ­ers and “spin­ning” — a finan­cial maneu­ver, now banned, in which Gold­man and oth­er firms alleged­ly trad­ed access to hot IPOs for bond busi­ness. Whit­man lat­er set­tled a share­hold­er law­suit relat­ed to prof­its she and oth­er execs made from buy­ing the IPOs.

In recent years, Whit­man has kept part of her for­tune, esti­mat­ed by Forbes mag­a­zine to be $1.2 bil­lion, in invest­ment funds man­aged by Gold­man, her finan­cial dis­clo­sure report indi­cates. For her cam­paign, she’s received $105,500 in dona­tions from Gold­man exec­u­tives, state records show.
Major play­er in finance

Mean­while, Gold­man is a major play­er in Cal­i­for­nia state finance. It has been the under­writer of $78.9 bil­lion in bonds issued by the state since 2006, records show, sec­ond only to Mer­rill Lynch, now a divi­sion of Bank of Amer­i­ca, which was under­writer of $79.3 bil­lion in the same peri­od. . . .