Morning Coffee: Goldman Sachs' London banker and the $900m loss. CV exaggeration in the UK's top finance role

efinancialcareers.com:

When 44-year-old Michael Bruun, the London-based co-head of global private equity at Goldman Sachs, invested in Swedish battery maker Northvolt in July 2022, he wrote on LinkedIn that he was «proud» to do so. 

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It wasn't the first time that Goldman's European private equity business, led by Bruun, put money into Northvolt. — Goldman led a funding round for the battery maker in 2019, after which Bruun wasgiven a seat on Northvolt's board. Bruun and Northvolt's CEO Peter Carlsson got on sufficiently well for Bruun to do his own Goldman Sachs 'insights' interview with Carlsson. Goldman became Northvolt's second-biggest shareholder, with a 19% stake in the firm. The investment was supposed to make big money: the Financial Times says Goldman told its investors that Northvolt would be worth 4.29 times what Goldman paid for it, and predicted that this would rise to six times by next year. 

In fact, Goldman's Northvolt investment is worth nothing at all. The FT reported at the weekend that the firm has written it down to zero after Northvolt filed for bankruptcy. Carlsson has resigned as CEO. Bruun's Goldman Sachs insights interview has been quietly deleted from the internet. And the Goldman investors who thought they'd get rich from Northvolt have lost all their money.  

Those investors include Goldman's ex-partners and its current employees, who paid into the West Street Capital Partners funds that invested in the battery firm. As the dust settles, questions will be asked about the wisdom of that investment, particularly in the light of earlier FT articles stressing the ineptitude of Northvolt's management and the excess of money sloshing around. As testimony to its