Matthew Taylor, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. trader, was sentenced to serve nine months in prison and pay $118 million in restitution to his former employer after pleading guilty in April of wire fraud in pursuing an unauthorized $8.3 billion futures trade deal in 2007, Reuters reported.
Prosecutors claimed that Taylor "lied to supervisors and fabricated trades in December 2007 to conceal an $8.3 billion position in Standard & Poor's 500 e-mini futures contracts, which bet on the direction of that index. Goldman fired him shortly thereafter," Reuters also reported.
The case is a "paradigm of everything that is wrong with Wall Street and the regulators charged with protecting the public," said U.S. District Judge William Pauley.
Taylor, who turns 35 on January 1, was previously fined $500,000 by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Reuters also reported..
Goldman Sachs also paid a $1.5 million civil fine last December to settle charges that it "failed to adequately supervise Taylor, an amount that Pauley said it earned back in a 'couple of minutes' given its more than &7 billion in annual faults," Reuters also reported.
"It cannot be called justice or oversight when it took the government six years to bring a rogue trader to justice, when the trader admitted his conduct on Day 1. At some point, the justice needs to be swift if it's going to mean anything, other than another press release and the ability to say, 'another pelt," added Judge Pauley.
The judge criticized both regulators and prosecutors "for failing to investigate Taylor for years and then claiming credit when they finally did," Reuters reported.
"We tried to rebuild our lives far from Wall Street," Taylor, a married father of two, who moved to Florida. He has started a pool cleaning business with his wife, according to Reuters.
