Charity gets Goldman gift
GOLDMAN Sachs has stepped up its drive to repair its image in the City with a donation of £1.5m to the Mayor’s Fund for London, which will help put young people into work. The donation will be used to fund the Shoreditch Brokerage, one of the Fund’s flagship projects in the capital.
The world’s largest investment bank was among those targeted by Boris Johnson earlier this year for paying staff “excessive” bonuses when the taxpayer had bailed them out.
The Mayor said the banks had an obligation to improve their sense of duty to the public if they were to repair reputations which had been tarnished during the credit crunch.
The Wall Street firm is currently under investigation in the UK by the Financial Services Authority after US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, charged it with defrauding investors of more than $1bn over toxic sub-prime mortgage asset sales.
Goldman has been working with the Mayor’s Fund to establish the new project and has committed to funding the work in East London for the next five years.
Sir Trevor Chinn, chairman of the Mayor’s Fund, said the “generous funding” would allow the Shoreditch Brokerage to roll out schemes to help lift young people out of poverty.
“Getting young people into decent jobs is one of the greatest social and economic challenges we face as a society. And nowhere is this issue more acute than in the Fund’s initial area of activity, Shoreditch,” he said.
“A significant gap exists between the vacancies employers offer and the skills and abilities of the community’s young people. There are many projects and schemes that focus on different parts of the employment chain, such as training, advice or recruitment. However, these schemes are disparate, of varying quality, and they don’t coordinate or connect.”