Now as the U.S. weighs how to handle Goldman Sachs, Vella is the mystery man to watch. If someone so powerful is found to have helped fuel the fiasco, it will be much harder for the bank to contain it by pinning blame on a rogue partner, Tim Leissner.
(Aug 16): Andrea Vella was Goldman Sachs’s top dealmaker in Hong Kong. He had a nose for splashy trades, a fondness for the Bentley Continental, and a vague enough resemblance to George Clooney that there was even a joke among some bankers: “What would George do?”
That was almost a year ago. Then U.S. prosecutors dragged him into one of the biggest Wall Street scandals in a generation. Without charging him, they filed court documents tying Vella to the conspiracy that looted billions of dollars from the Malaysian investment fund known as 1MDB. The bank promptly put him on leave.
