Last week, in response to an Overstock.com
motion to unseal certain documents, the
banks' lawyers, apparently accidentally,
filed an unredacted version of Overstock's
motion as an exhibit in their declaration
of opposition to that motion. In doing so,
they inadvertently entered into the public
record a sort of greatest-hits selection of
the very material they've been fighting for
years to keep sealed.
And now let's parse it:
Last week, the banks' lawyers filed an
unredacted version of Overstock's motion
as an exhibit in their declaration of
opposition to that motion.
This means that Overstock's accusation is now public. This says nothing about the veracity of the accusation.
> This means that Overstock's accusation is now public. This says nothing about the veracity of the accusation.
The information about this comes from internal Goldman emails produced during discovery which admit to the practice. Emails that Goldman has fought in court to prevent the release of, only to have one of their own lawyers screw up by filing something not under seal.
EDIT: If you want to quote the actual emails, I've added most of the quotes from them below:
"Fuck the compliance area – procedures, schmecedures," chirps Peter Melz, former president of Merrill Lynch Professional Clearing Corp. (a.k.a. Merrill Pro), when a subordinate worries about the company failing to comply with the rules governing short sales.
"He should be someone we can work with, especially if he sees that cooperation results in resources, both data and funding," the lobbyist writes, "while resistance results in isolation."
“We are NOT borrowing negatives… I have made that clear from the beginning. Why would we want to borrow them? We want to fail them.”
“Two months ago 107% of the floating was short!”
“We have to be careful not to link locates to fails [because] we have told the regulators we can’t,” one executive is quoted as saying, in the document.
