Goldman Announces New Business Standards Committe

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the Wall Street firm facing a fraud lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, named E. Gerald Corrigan and J. Michael Evans to oversee a new business standards committee.

Corrigan, 68, joined the firm in 1994 after a 25-year career at the Federal Reserve, culminating as president of the New York Fed. Evans, 52, arrived in 1993 after 10 years at Salomon Brothers, now part of Citigroup Inc., and is both a vice chairman of the company and chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia. The panel will make a final report public after a December board meeting, Goldman Sachs said today in a statement.

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chairman and chief executive officer, announced plans to create the committee at the firm’s annual shareholder meeting on May 7. He said the panel, formed after the SEC lawsuit and a U.S. Senate grilling of Goldman Sachs’s top executives over their treatment of clients, would make recommendations on how the firm could reinforce its focus on clients and ethics.

“This initiative is consistent with our obligation to ensure that our standards across our business activities are of the highest quality and represent the benchmark for the industry globally,” Blankfein, 55, said in today’s statement.

The committee will have 17 members, the firm said. They include Chief Administrative Officer Jeffrey Schroeder, who will serve as the panel’s chief operating officer, and David Greenwald, the firm’s international general counsel and deputy general counsel, who will provide legal advice.

Cooper, Daffey, Gnodde

The other members are: Edith Cooper, global head of human capital management; Michael Daffey, global head of equities sales and securities distribution in Europe; Richard Gnodde, co- CEO of Goldman Sachs’s European business; David Heller, global co-head of the securities division; Kevin Kennedy, head of Goldman Sachs’s Latin American business; Arthur Levitt, the former SEC chairman who now serves as an adviser to Goldman Sachs; Gwen Libstag, head of business selection and conflicts clearance; Timothy O’Neill, co-head of the investment management division; Harvey Schwartz, global co-head of the securities division; Sarah Smith, controller and chief accounting officer; David Solomon and John S. Weinberg, co-heads of the investment banking division; and Matthew Westerman, global head of equity capital markets.

Ten of the 17 members of the committee, including Evans, already serve on the firm’s 30-person management committee.

To contact the reporter on this story: Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net