SEC asks Goldman for compensation of ex-VP Tourre following fraud verdict

By Amanda Becker

(Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has asked Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYS:GS) to disclose the salary and bonus of a former bank vice president who was found liable of securities fraud.

A jury found Fabrice Tourre guilty in August of six of the seven civil charges he faced over transactions the SEC said caused $1 billion of investor losses.

Tourre has asked a federal judge to dismiss the case against him or set a new trial. The request for salary information, which could reveal the scope of the penalties the SEC will seek from Tourre, was disclosed in a Wednesday night filing in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

"I have become aware that the SEC recently submitted a request to Goldman Sachs & Co. for certain information regarding Mr. Tourre," Pamela Rogers Chepiga, Tourre's lawyer, wrote in the filing.

The SEC is expected to make its request for monetary relief from Tourre by mid December.

Chepiga told the court she learned of the request for Tourre's base salary and bonus broken out by year from 2005 to the present, along with all documents related to the bonus he received in 2007, from Goldman's attorneys.

A Goldman spokesman declined to comment on the filing.

Tourre told jurors during the July trial that he earned $1.7 million in salary and bonus in 2007. That year he worked on the synthetic collateralized debt obligation Abacus 2007-AC1. He was found to have misled investors by concealing how hedge fund billionaire John Paulson helped construct the transaction and bet it would fail.

Tourre is now pursuing a doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago.

The case is SEC v. Tourre, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 10-03229.

(Reporting By Amanda Becker; Editing by Richard Pullin)