Investing.com -- Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin -- the fundraising director for Donald Trump during this year's presidential election -- retains strong ties to his former partners at the leading investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE:GS), according reports in the financial press.
Mnuchin made partner at Goldman back in 1995, about a decade after he followed his in his father's footsteps, and joined the firm as a financier. He was a graduate of Yale University, near New York City, one of America's most prestigious universities.
He left the organization in 2001. But he has worked, during the past decade and a half, with his former partners on a variety of deals, financing films in Hollywood for superstar Tom Cruise, for which he has become famous, as well as participating in the deal to purchase IndyMac Bank in the aftermath of the stock market collapse in 2008.
Mnuchin is said to have become a multi-millionaire from Goldman's initial public offering (IPO) in the 1990s, and remains wealthy today.
His former partners have continued their collaboration with him over the years, including Mark Schwartz, a former Goldman partner, who was chief executive of Soros Fund Management at the time, oversaw Mnuchin’s tenure as head of a new credit fund in 2003.
After that, he was co-founder, with former Goldman colleagues Daniel Neidich and Chip Seelig, of Dune Capital Management LP. The firm's business was seeded by George Soros.
Mnuchin had met President-electTrump socially at first, but by the mid-2000s, the duo did business together.
Dune Capital joined private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group in making a $130 million mezzanine level loan to fund the construction of Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, on the Chicago River, and whose construction took place on the former long-time site of The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper.
The nomination of Mnuchin is controversial among many progressives, who claim it violates Trump's promise to "drain the swamp," metaphorically speaking, of Washington D.C.'s ties to lobbyists.
Mnuchin has never been a lobbyist, however, and many others argue that defeating Hillary Clinton was the primary objective of the strategy behind the Trump metaphor, and that mission has been completed.