By Marcy Gordon and Daniel Wagner
Goldman Sachs & Co. has agreed to pay $550 million to settle civil fraud charges that the Wall Street giant misled buyers of mortgage-related investments.
The settlement was announced Thursday by the Securities and Exchange Commission hours after Congress gave final approval to the stiffest restrictions on banks and Wall Street since the Great Depression.
The deal calls for Goldman to pay the SEC fines of $300 million. The rest of the money will go to compensate those who lost money on their investments.
The penalty was the largest against a Wall Street firm in SEC history. But the settlement amounts to less than 5 percent of Goldman’s 2009 net income of $12.2 billion after payment of dividends to preferred shareholders — or a little more than two weeks of net income.
