On Monday at London Supreme Court, the lawyers of the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund (LSWF) accused the American bank, Goldman Sachs, of taking advantage of the officials of the LSWF, who are inexperienced, to sign agreements that cost the fund 1.07 billion euros.
The whole issue between the fund and Goldman Sachs goes back to some agreements signed back in 2008 after the fund had been formed and assigned to manage Libya’s oil revenue.
On the first day of the trial that lasts 8 weeks, the fund’s lawyer, Roger Masefield, read an internal letter written by Idris Ben Ibrahim, who is one of the Goldman Sachs’ partners, confirming that the fund is newly formed – “very primitive and everyone can exploit it.”
In addition, on another occasion, Yousif Kabbaj – one of the Goldman Sachs employees - took advantage of the inexperience of one of the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund’s employees to sell him commodities that made the fund lose 1.2 billion dollars, while Goldman Sachs secured a profit worth more than 220 million dollars, according to the fund’s lawyers.
In the meantime, Goldman Sachs had refuted that it ever tried to influence the fund, confirming that the transactions and agreements included financial commodities that are well-known in the financial world.
“The crisis of loans and their impact on the international markets had been a little too much longer than the Libyan Sovereign Wealth Fund and most of the market stakeholders expected.” Goldman Sachs explained in some documents it had given to the court, adding that the Libyan fund was a victim of an unforeseen financial crisis, not of any wrongdoing.”
