He’s been married three times, loves sports cars and may well be the guy who helped bring down Goldman Sachs.
Paolo Pellegrini, a 6-foot-2-inch Italian securities trader who once worked with hedge fund titan John Paulson, has emerged as a key figure in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud case against Goldman and one of its young vice presidents, Fabrice Tourre.
In addition to having been Tourre’s contact at Paulson’s firm, Paulson & Co., Pellegrini is being widely seen as having given valuable information to support the SEC’s fraud claim.
However, a person close to Pellegrini said the 53-year-old spoke with the SEC just once, in 2008, and is “miffed” at the suggestion that he played a vital role in the SEC’s case against the gold-plated bank.
According to this person, Pellegrini spoke with the SEC while he was still an employee at Paulson & Co., and the agency at the time was fishing for information into troubled mortgage securities that were threatening the financial system.
Nevertheless, the SEC has cited an employee of Paulson & Co. as having provided information that prompted the agency to look into Goldman’s sales practices and the mortgage product that lost investors $1 billion while at the same time earning Paulson the same amount.