The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission established by the US Congress to examine the causes of the financial crisis, has issued a statement detailing its “continued frustration with [Goldman Sach's] failure to produce specifically identified documents and the misleading nature of Goldman’s production thus far” and has now issued a subpoena.

As well as documents, the subpoena requires the attendances of witnesses Broderick, Davilman, Egol, Lehman, Sherwood, Sparks and Ostrem within ten days, followed by agreed schedules for the interviews of Viniar, Cohn and Blankfein.

The Commission is also, along with US regulators, investigating allegations that Goldman Sachs misled investors when it sold mortgage securities. In the latter case, Goldman Sachs allegedly did not tell investors that it had used the services of renowned hedge fund manager, John Paulson, to choose securities that he wanted to short-sell.

Lawyers and wealth management figures have told this publication that Goldman Sachs' wealth management business could suffer an exodus of clients worried about the impact of the allegations. The Wall Street firm vigorously denies any wrongdoing.

The FCIC has said that Goldman produced five terabytes of documents (while a terabyte does not easily correlate to pages, 1 terabyte is approximately 500 million pages). Commission chairman Phil Angelides is reported by the Financial Times as saying: “We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices and dump a load of rubbish.”

Angelides said Goldman had been asked to provide information similar to that sought from other big banks but was an “outlier” in its “abysmal” response, which was described as an attempt to “stonewall” and “obfuscate” over months of “mischief making”.