By David Dolan and Pascal Fletcher
JOHANNESBURG, March 15 (Reuters) – Greg Smith was a
principled and competitive student, the kind of person whose
strong sense of right and wrong probably pushed him to resign
from Goldman Sachs in a scathing letter to an international
newspaper, his former teacher and coach said.
A quiet, unassuming child, the South African first attended
the private Jewish King David’s High School in suburban
Johannesburg before winning a scholarship to Stanford University
in the United States.
Smith then joined Goldman Sachs, a workplace he once loved
but described in his resignation letter in the New York Times on
Wednesday as having developed an environment “as toxic and
destructive as I have ever seen it”.
“He was a remarkable young man, exceptionally intelligent
with an integrity that is probably unequalled,” Elliot Wolf, the
school’s retired headmaster, told Reuters in an interview.
“An absolutely remarkable man with high principles. He was
an asset to the school in every possible way.”
Wolf, who is now retired after 34 years at the school
including 28 as headmaster, said he remembered Smith well from
teaching him Latin and that he was loved by all because he was
polite, unassuming and decent.
The Goldman Sachs banker sat a total of eight exams in his
final year of secondary school in 1996, winning a distinction in
every subject, Wolf said. According to school records, Smith’s
subjects included maths, advanced maths, Hebrew, English,
Afrikaans and accounting.
“He was a wonderful young man with the highest principles.
That was already part of his character when he was very, very
young,” Wolf said.
Continued…
