Two former Goldman Sachs & Co. brokers in Los Angeles won a $7.6 million award for wrongful termination and discrimination against military personnel after one of the men was retaliated against by a supervisor for being on reserve duty, their lawyer announced Monday.
A Financial Industry Regulatory Authority arbitration panel Friday awarded Chris Barra and Luis Sampedro $5.2 million in compensatory damages and $2 million in punitive damages, and granted Barra, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, $100,000 for the discrimination offense, according to their lawyer, Rogge Dunn.
A request for comment left with the Goldman media office in New York after regular business hours was not immediately answered.
Barra and Sampedro, who worked as a team at Goldman for nine years until 2007 and now work for a unit of UBS Financial Services, filed the case in 2010.
Among the evidence heard by the panel was that Barra was chastised and retaliated against by Goldman’s Los Angeles branch manager for going on reserve duty, Dunn said.
Dunn said the ruling should serve as “a warning to companies that you cannot treat members of the military differently than other employees or discourage them from taking military leave.”
— City News Service