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Đào 0912319382

Goldman Sachs denies Hanoi firm’s tie-up claim

Nguyen Trung Ha, president of the recently-listed Thien Viet Securities Company Two Goldman Sachs executives rejected Tuesday claims made by a Hanoi firm of a partnership with the US-based financial firm.

Nguyen Trung Ha, president of the recently-listed Thien Viet Securities Company (TVS), told a Vietnamese newswire last month that “Goldman Sachs trusted TVS and has chosen it to be its partner in Vietnam”. News of the ‘partnership’ with the global investment banking and securities biggie – ranked 41st in the Fortune 500 last year – caused a sensation and saw TVS’s stock skyrocket. Last Monday Ha showed a bundle of fax messages at a press conference and claimed it was evidence of a “local partnership”. But John G.Andrews, Goldman Sachs’ managing director in charge of investors’ relations, has put to rest all speculation. He told Thanh Nien by email: “I can confirm that we have no formal association with TVS.” Edward Naylor, Goldman Sachs’ managing director in charge of corporate communications based in Hong Kong, said: “We enjoy a positive and ongoing dialogue of an exploratory and non-exclusive nature [with TVS], as we do with other local securities firms.” “We often sign standard agreements with individual securities firms when we are exploring opportunities with them. “These agreements relate to specific individual potential projects and in no way refer to, or should be misconstrued as, wide ranging partnerships,” he wrote. TVS reaction Ha, contacted by Thanh Nien after the denials by the two executives, neither denied nor confirmed the partnership, saying Goldman Sachs had referred to TVS in a document as a “local partner” and that he had not exaggerated. But he added that TVS was “fundamentally a service provider to Goldman Sachs in Vietnam”. Asked why he had not called TVS a “service provider” but, instead, used the term “local partner”, which could be misunderstood as Goldman Sachs investing in TVS, Ha insisted he had used the “right word”. He denied attempting to mislead investors to buoy up his stocks, saying “as a manager, rising stocks can only put more pressure on me. Because I don’t sell stocks, I never intended to boost them”. It turns out that Ha owned 70 percent of the company’s stocks before they were listed. Asked why a major shareholder like him did not want to see his stocks appreciate, Ha said: “I don’t know how to explain it; that is my nature.” “I have never done anything wrong – ask those who work with me and you will know that.” Le Huy Hoang, TVS’s founder and now head of its supervision committee, had earlier publicly disagreed with Ha, insisting there was no formal partnership with the US firm. The two companies had informally agreed to cooperate in a “strategic partnership”, he said. Huy Nam, a securities expert, said shareholders who invested in a company’s stocks after being made to believe it had tied up with prominent partners, and lost as a result, had the right to sue the firm if the claims turned out to be false. Reported by Trung Binh, Hoang Ly - Translated by A.N.O.N