HuffPO-

Meanwhile, one of only two of Romney’s lobbyist-bundlers to reach the ‘Stars’ level is T. Martin Fiorentino Jr., of the Fiorentino Group. By May, he had raised over $325,000 for Romney.

One of Fiorentino’s most notorious clients is Lender Processing Services, a foreclosure mill that, as Matt Viser of the Boston Globe noted, was reprimanded in April for “unsound practices related to residential mortgage loan serving and foreclosure processing.” Viser went on:

[A]s he [Romney] has built his fund-raising machine, he has relied heavily on a man who has lobbied Congress on mortgage reform and anti-predatory lending legislation that contained strict rules aimed at preventing another subprime mortgage collapse.Fiorentino’s Jacksonville, Fla.-based firm, the Fiorentino Group, has been paid $180,000 by Lender Processing Services since late 2009, according to lobbying disclosure forms. The firm lobbied the House and Senate on the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act.

The legislation…came in response to the subprime mortgage crisis and was meant to prevent lenders from making loans that borrowers would have difficulty repaying. It was approved by the House in May 2009, but wasn’t taken up that year by the Senate.

Much of the legislation ended up being included last year in the Dodd-Frank Act, a larger overhaul of national financial regulations.

Lender Processing Services is one of the country’s largest mortgage service providers, claiming to handle more than half of all foreclosures and providing services for more than 1,000 financial institutions. The company came under scrutiny after admitting last year that one of its subsidiaries, DocX, had been improperly preparing some of the foreclosure documents.

DocX was ground zero in the massive “robosigning” fraud. Its founder and former president was indicted in Georgia on 136 fraud counts earlier this year, and is under indictment in other states as well. The robosigning scandal led to a call for investigations by all 50 state attorneys general; this is turn led to the National Mortgage Settlement agreement.

[HUFFINGTON POST]

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