Goldman’s Forst to Leave; Lane Promoted

By Christine Harper - Dec 4, 2011 12:36 AM GMT+0700

Edward C. Forst, co-head of the investment management division at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), will leave at the end of the year and cede his role to Eric S. Lane, according to internal memos obtained by Bloomberg News.

Forst, 50, who first joined Goldman Sachs in 1994, is the third member of the New York-based bank’s management committee to resign since the beginning of November, after Kevin W. Kennedy, who ran the business in Latin America, and Yusuf A. Alireza, co-head of the Asia-Pacific business outside Japan.

Goldman Sachs Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein has said that building the investment management division, which oversees private equity and hedge funds and also handles money for wealthy individuals, is a priority for the firm. Timothy O’Neill, who has served as a co-head of the unit since 2008, will remain in the role alongside Lane, the memos said.

Lane, who joined Goldman Sachs in 1996 and was promoted to partner in 2002, is a longtime employee of the investment management division, known as IMD. In that sense he represents a change from recent leaders of the business, including Forst, O’Neill and former managers such as Marc A. Spilker and Peter S. Kraus, who were transferred from positions in trading or investment banking.

Leader, Clients

“As a long-tenured leader in IMD, Eric has demonstrated dedication to our clients and a deep understanding of markets,” Blankfein and Gary D. Cohn, Goldman Sachs’s president and chief operating officer, said in one of the memos to staff yesterday. “His extensive experience in the division positions him well to lead IMD with Tim.”

Andrea Raphael, a spokeswoman for Goldman Sachs in New York, confirmed the memos’ contents and declined to comment further. The New York Times wrote about the changes yesterday.

Forst, who worked at Bankers Trust before joining Goldman Sachs, started his Goldman Sachs career in capital markets and later held senior roles in the equities and fixed-income, currencies and commodities, or FICC, trading divisions.

He became co-head of investment management in 2007 and then left the firm in 2008 for a role at Harvard University. A year later, he returned to Goldman Sachs as the firm’s senior strategy officer and in 2010 returned to his current role at the investment management division.

To contact the reporters on this story: Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Sylvia Wier at swier@bloomberg.net