Ax Said To Fall On Goldman's Sharp-Tongued PR Guy

The New York Times contains a catch-up story today about 20 executive at Goldman Sachs -- “still stinging from bad publicity” –-- having interviewed Richard “Jake” Siewert Jr. over the course of  several months for the chief communications job that’s been held by Lucas van Praag, “a smooth-talking Briton,” since 2000. He had been named a partner at the firm in 2006 –- a rarified position for a PR guy.   

I was prepared to report that the Times’ “Goldman at a P.R. Crossroads” story had been updated online by 6:30, in keeping with the spate of “Lucas van Praag Ousted” stories around the Web, but it hadn’t. Indeed, official word is still forthcoming.

The firm “has been battling a seemingly never-ending barrage of negative publicity since the financial crisis,” points out the Times’ Susanne Craig. “As the missteps mounted, many Goldman insiders focused their anger at the messenger -- in this case, the company’s public relations department.”

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Specifically, the acerbic boss. “Van Praag, 62, is expected to leave Goldman in the coming months,” Liz Rappaport reports in the Wall Street Journal’s “Deal Journal” blog.

Bloomberg’s Cristine Alesci and Christine Harper had repoprted Wednesday thatSiewert, who was a press secretary for President Bill Clinton and managed corporate development and public strategy at Alcoa before becoming a counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner in 2009, was in talks with the firm.

New York magazine’s “Daily Intel” blogger, Jessica Pressler, followedthat story by "sadly” confirming that van Praag has been asked to leave, according to a source, “for reasons that include his baroque vocabulary.” The move has evidently been contemplated for some time but Goldman did not want to appear “desperate” while it was “mid-maelstrom” and in the headlines.

Two years and two days ago, Pressler compiled A Short History” of van Praag’s “Most Withering Rebuttals.” The piece contained such vituperative doozies as his response to reports that CEO Lloyd Blankfein was planning to take a $100 million bonus: “"There’s speculation, and there is stupidity,” quoth van Praag. “This speculation transcends the simply stupid and takes it to an entirely new level ... giving credibility to tittle-tattle is pretty shoddy journalism.”

Speaking of truculent, how about: "There is nothing to be taken away from the story other than the fact that reporter fails to comprehend the subject matter."

“The first thing Wall Street thought when it saw chief Goldman spokesperson Lucas van Praag’s greatest phrases compiled … was that the man has a way with words, The New York Observer’s Max Abelson observed at the time. “Mr. van Praag owns a dazzling vocabulary that’s allowed him, in the last three weeks alone, to bemoan the shoddy tittle-tattle of the Sunday Times and the Wall Street Journal’s preposterous effluent." (The second thought, more tellingly, was that “all of these majestic Victorian taunts … might not be” in Goldman’s best interest.)

“At a time when people perceive banks to be elitist and beneficiaries of the bailout at the expense of average homeowners, to go around and stick your head out of the sunroof of your Bentley and say, ‘Fuck you, critics,’” said a business editor at a major publication, “is counterproductive,” Abelson writes.

Despite the fact that reporters were the butt of van Praag’s horns, many will apparently miss him.

“Van Praag’s erudite and cutting put-downs were unusual enough in an industry that prefers to gripe anonymously,” writes Reuters’ Antony Currie. “But it was especially surprising they emanated from the notoriously tight-lipped Goldman.”

Reports the WSJ’s Rappaport: “After work hours, with an icey lime-drenched Stolichnaya vodka in hand, van Praag was known to regale some reporters with tales about his time in the British navy, his ‘Masterpiece’-worthy ‘Mum,’ and his children, who seem from his stories as sassy as he is.”

As loquacious and pugnacious as he may be, one gathers that van Pragg is more of a Marquess of Queensbury gentleman than a cage fighter so, as he falls to the canvas, we will allow him the last words via one last gem from Pressler’s 2010 piece:

"Perhaps publishing online financial commentary means there is less editorial oversight. If so, there is a real danger that nonsense can get dressed up as reality when, in fact, it is nothing more than a chimera produced by a febrile mind."

Allow us to say ouch.

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