Fabrice Tourre (above) may be only 27. He may not look like a mastermind. But Goldman Sachs says he created a whole crooked sector of anti-client hedging – which other banks then copied and used – entirely by himself and without the knowledge of any senior partners. He is pictured above on a sky-diving trip, trying to catch flying pigs.

They also ignored emails saying stuff like, “Listen fellas, here’s a great way to screw two lots of clients and make twice as much lovely money”. But despite having been dilatory about the one-man crimewave for so many years, Goldman had “already put this employee on paid leave before the SEC charges were made” they told the media this morning. So ze Fuhrer knew nuzzink (Sachs) and I voss only obeyink orders (Tourre) is what we can probably expect from here on.

There are 7, 545 employees at Goldman’s Houston offices where Farbice was based. He was just a plain Veep – the kind of title they hand out in cereal packs – and based in a provincial office. Above him in even his one little enclave were Lawrence Calcano, Hasha Raghavan, Ryan Limaye, Bruce Tenenbaum, Martin Brady and Nicholas Eaton. Above this lot is a whole further layer of management, of which the best known are Mark Eisner and Lloyd Blankfein. This is what a similarly ranked former New York staffer now employed in legal work told us yesterday:

“Whatever Fourre was doing, trust me – Goldman Sachs is too savvy to let a minor rogue trader mis-sell something this big. The idea is nuts, and it looks to me like the SEC know that. The guys in our module laughed when we heard it. But none of us were surprised. They’re getting their punch in first, before Fourre starts to spill it, you know, what we call ‘he said, she said’. Goldman’s top guys will say, ‘Well he would say that, right?’ It’s pretty desperate stuff.

US financial CDO expert Amanda Fox says, “The case against [Goldman Sachs] seems fairly tight if the information currently provided is accurate”. The ramifications of a guilty verdict will be familiar to (and eagerly awaited by) anti-Goldman websites around the globe, but to most people the likely ripples from all this are not well understood. If the SEC makes its case stick, it will effectively be saying that one key root cause of the world financial crisis – the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage sector – was planned purely for profit by one bank…a bank which for years has been the subject of outlandish conspiracy theories, but none more far-fetched than this.