FINE GAEL MEP Gay Mitchell has called for Goldman Sachs to appear before a European parliamentary committee to answer allegations of “client abuse”.

Mr Mitchell has asked the chairman of the European Economic and Monetary Affairs committee to invite the investment bank along with “similar firms” to respond to the allegations made by a former employee of the bank this week.

Greg Smith, an executive director at the US firm’s London office, said his colleagues “callously” talked about “ripping their clients off” and he regularly saw managing directors refer to their clients as “muppets”.

Mr Smith, who spent 12 years with the firm, made the accusations in a New York Times article on Wednesday.

“To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money,” Mr Smith said. He described the environment at the bank as “toxic and destructive”.

Mr Mitchell described as “widespread” the alleged Goldman Sachs culture of “seeing every client as a source to be tapped at every opportunity – even to the point of selling them products of dubious value.”

He has called for a return to “traditional bank managers who would give genuine advice”.

Meanwhile, one of Europe’s largest asset managers, APG, has lashed out at Goldman Sachs for not communicating quickly enough with clients after this week’s events. The Dutch investment adviser that runs €300 billion of assets for more than 4.5 million people in the Netherlands, said it was surprised it took the Wall Street bank more than a day to offer it any reassurance on points raised in Mr Smith’s resignation letter.

“We would have expected that a company that faces such a big media backlash over something so core to their business such as client trust would have instantly reached out to those clients to say something,” APG spokesman Harmen Geers said. –(Additional reporting, Reuters)