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Note: Yoel Zaoui sees fascinating challenges ahead for Goldman Sachs' M&A business.
Yoel Zaoui of goldman sachs group is accustomed to spending his time talking to chief executives about deals. But Goldman's head of investment banking for Europe, the Middle East and Africa spent the weekend of April 17, 2010, talking to many of them about his firm, which had just been sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over a 2007 collateralized debt obligation transaction known as Abacus.
Zaoui took the potential fallout very seriously, especially as critics predicted it could hurt the bank's most valuable client business: its M&A franchise. Goldman (which settled the case last June without admitting wrongdoing) embarked on what Zaoui calls "a big exercise of introspection whilst redoubling our efforts with our clients."
A lot was at stake for the 49-year-old Zaoui, who was one of only a handful of executives responsible for building Goldman's European investment banking business from scratch, beginning in 1989. "At that time, investment banking was the new thing, and I was asked to go to Europe and start...