The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, plans to step down as soon as the end of this year, ending a controversial 12-year tenure with the investment bank, the New York Times reported on Friday.
Goldman intends to replace Blankfein, 63, with its co-president David Solomon, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter that it didn’t name.
Mr. Blankfein, who is Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, was appointed to his roles in June 2006. Also, he successfully led his bank through the 2008 global economic and financial crisis without any major mishaps.
Speculations of his stepping down as the CEO have been rife after Blankfein publicly revealed two years ago that he had a highly curable form of lymphoma.
However, he wasn’t the first Wall Street CEO to receive a cancer diagnosis. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon also revealed in 2014 that he had been undergoing treatment for throat cancer.
Shares of Goldman closed down 0.88 percent on Friday.
Earlier this month, the bank was hit by a $110 million fine from the New York regulators and the Federal Reserve in an antitrust lawsuit alleging that its traders routinely manipulated the Forex market for their profit.
The DFS said Goldman Sachs had insufficient oversight and controls over its FX traders, who allegedly discussed trading positions with competitors, using electronic chatrooms. The traders frequently tried to trade ahead of big foreign-Exchange transactions by their clients, a practice known as front-running.
