The saga of the Heinz call option insider trade, first profiled here [10], and the Goldman trail, also first observed here [11] ("Does GS stand for Goldman Sachs one wonders"), just got even more fun as revelations that it was none other than a client of Goldman's Private Wealth group out of Zurich that hit the buy key on those thousands in call options one day ahead of the announcement. From Reuters [12]: "A Goldman Sachs private wealth client is the holder of the Swiss account at the center of an investigation into insider trading in H.J. Heinz Co options, regulators said in a court filing late Wednesday." Alas, and as before, the question of who leaked the inside information to this Goldman client still remains unanswered.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against unknown traders last week, alleging they used a Goldman account in Zurich to buy an unusual amount of Heinz options the day before the ketchup maker agreed to sell itself for $23 billion.
In an SEC application to freeze the defendants' assets, dated February 15 but filed with the court Wednesday, staff attorney David Brown said the commission had been told by Goldman that "the account holder is a Goldman Sachs Private Wealth client in Switzerland."
In another application also dated February 15 and filed Wednesday, Brown's colleague Megan Bergstrom said Goldman had informed the SEC "it does not have direct access to information about the beneficial owner or owners behind any particular transaction or position" in the account.
The minimum net worth to be a Goldman Private Wealth client in Switzerland is....
And now back to regularly scheduled Great Rotation as quadrillions in imaginary retail money flow into a stock market which was, is, and always will be a massive cesspool of inside information, with one name always reappearing at the top.
[13]