Show me the money!
Wall Street star Deeb Salem, a former Goldman Sachs mortgage bond trader, feels his $8.25 million bonus in 2010 was about $5 million less than he deserved — and he’s asking a Manhattan judge for the right to fight for the rest of the loot.
Salem, who left the top-shelf Wall Street bank in 2012, told an arbitration panel that he deserved every penny of the $13 million bonus — which followed his $15 million bonus a year earlier — in part because he told his mother that he expected the prodigious payout, according to the transcript of the arbitration proceeding.
The 35-year-old whiz is fighting for the extra $5 million even after admitting in his employee evaluation that he was betting against a Goldman mortgage bond issue the bank sold to investors.
At the same time, Salem misrepresented the quality of the mortgage bonds while selling them to investors, according to a 2011 US Senate report.
Salem is asking Justice Eileen Bransten to overturn a decision by Finra — a Wall Street regulator — to toss his $5 million claim.
Goldman denies owing Salem any additional bonus.
“These claims are utterly ridiculous, which is why they were rejected by a Finra panel, and unworthy of any further response,” a Goldman statement said.
Salem’s action regarding the mortgage bond issue — known as the Hudson collateralized debt obligation (CDO) — made news in 2011 when the Senate report found that Goldman tried to manipulate markets.
In 2006, Goldman wanted to get rid of mortgage investments it foresaw going bad, and Salem selected 40 percent of the crappy assets that made up Hudson, according to the Senate report.
While selling the Hudson CDO, Salem, then a vice president, lied to investors by saying the assets were “sourced from the Street,” giving the impression that Goldman wasn’t just trying to sell before the mortgages all crashed, the report says.
In reality, the bank was betting that the whole thing would eventually be worthless when the mortgage markets collapsed — and eventually made more than $1 billion profit by suckering its clients, according to the report.
“My guy was short the mortgage market in ’06,” Salem’s lawyer, Jonathan Sack, bragged to The Post on Thursday.
Regulators had been investigating how Goldman sold and put together the Hudson CDOs, the bank has said in regulatory documents.
Salem’s lawyers argue that Goldman owes him money because his bosses had originally promised him $13 million — but then reneged.
“The guy was told, we gotta hold back money from you because the Department of Justice is breathing down our back,” Sack told The Post.
Salem, a Princeton graduate who sold complex securities backed by mortgages and derivatives, was paid $30 million during his first 10 years out of college, according to O’Melveny & Myers LLP’s Andrew Frackman, an attorney for Goldman Sachs, whose testimony was relayed in the transcript.
Sack declined on Thursday to answer questions about Salem’s role in the Hudson CDO.
Salem didn’t return a message for him at his office at the hedge fund GoldenTree Asset Management, where he went to work after leaving Goldman.
Andrew Williams, a Goldman spokesman, declined to comment beyond the statement.