Former Goldman Sachs exec Greg Smith lands book deal

Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs executive director, who wrote a scathing New York Times opinion column about his former employer has landed a book deal to write about his 12 years at the firm, Reuters wrote.

Smith, who resigned from Goldman earlier this month, set off a bidding war when he met with several major publishers earlier this week.

The New York Post said Grand Central publishing, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group, paid Smith a reported $1.5 million advance for the book.

On March 14, his last day at the the firm, Smith wrote an open resignation letter, published in the Times which said "I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it."

He said the firm put its own interests ahead of clients, who Goldman managing directors routinely referred to as “muppets.” Smith said the investment firm cares more about making profits than anything else and that "Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, [have] lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch."

Smith started as an intern in Stanford, Conn. and worked his way up, in New York and then London, to running Goldman's US equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa from London. 

Wendi Lazar, an employment lawyer at Outten & Golden who regularly handles legal work for employees in financial services, told Forbes that Smith could face some legal problems if he writes a purely non-fiction account of his time at Goldman if he signed a confidentiality agreement.

However, Lazar and others say he could write a book that includes stories that are composites of what really happened – where names of clients, deals and events are changed – without running afoul of such an agreement.