Goldman Sachs subpoenad for stonewalling inquiry

An US inquiry commission examining the causes of the financial meltdown, yesterday slapped Goldman Sachs with subpoenas for trying repeatedly to hoodwink and stonewall the inquiry investigating the bank's role in the mortgage securities market.

After Goldman Sachs repeatedly refused to attend the inquiry hearing or hand over related documents voluntarily, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) issued a subpoena asking the investment bank to comply with its request for documents and interviews in a timely manner.

The commission said that instead of sending documents related to specific items, Goldman Sachs chose to dump on the commission five terabytes of documents - or around 2.5 billion pages - in an attempt to stonewall the investigation.

The commission sees this as an attempt by Goldman Sachs to deliberately delay the inquiry by dumping reams unawanted information to specific queries.

"We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices and dump a bunch of rubbish, we asked for very specific items," commission chairman Phil Angelides told reporters yesterday.

Bill Thomas, the commission's vice chairman, went as far as to say that Goldman was trying to hide something from the inquiry panel.