Oh Boy! What will they do now without these magical words?

NYT-

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a fundamental policy shift, said Friday that it would no longer allow defendants to say they neither admit nor deny civil fraud or insider trading charges when, at the same time, they admit to or have been convicted of criminal violations.

The change is the first time that the S.E.C. has stepped back from its longstanding practice of allowing companies to settle fraud charges by paying a fine without admitting wrongdoing. The new policy will also apply to cases where a company or an individual enters an agreement with criminal authorities to defer prosecution or to not be prosecuted as part of a settlement.

[NEW YORK TIMES]

Those of you who’ve had any dealings with Ameriquest may find this interesting…

Via William McCloskey

William McCloskey worked for Ameriquest from November 2004 till March 2005. William was fired after he reported illegal activity behind the walls of his Ameriquest branch, which virtually mirrored all of the widespread reports about the company (to local detectives, the PA Attorney General, the S.E.C. and the F.B.I).

William sued Ameriquest Mortgage Company under the whistleblower provision of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. The act pertained to publicly traded companies and issuers of securities under Section 15(d) and 12h-3 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.

[WJM 7]

NYT-

The federal judge overseeing the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud case against Citigroup became even more direct in his criticism of the agency’s actions on Thursday, accusing the commission of misleading both his court and the federal court of appeals.

[NEW YORK TIMES]

© 2010-12 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.
www.StopForeclosureFraud.com

One by One, judges are going to finally have enough of the ponzi’s.

To the judges who aren’t turning a blind eye… thank you.

NYT-

A federal judge in Wisconsin has challenged the Securities and Exchange Commission over a proposed settlement of fraud charges against a publicly traded company, citing as a precedent the agency’s pending case against Citigroup.

That represents a significant expansion of the impact of the Citigroup case, in which Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in New York threw out a proposed settlement between the company and the S.E.C.

Judge Rakoff said he had rejected the Citigroup settlement because there were no established facts on which to base a decision whether the settlement was “fair, reasonable, adequate and in the public interest.”

[NEW YORK TIMES]

New Economic Prospectives-

The Wall Street Journal ran a story today (12/27/11) entitled “SEC Ups Its Game to Identify Rogue Firms.”

“Rogue” is an interesting word with a range of definitions. When it is used as an adjective its meaning is: “a playfully mischievous person; scamp.” The trivialization of the most destructive elite frauds is one of the most common forms of what criminologists call “neutralization” of the moral content of wrong doing. Neutralization increases crime.

The actual story makes it clear that the criminals that the SEC was identifying were not “rogues.” They were the CEOs of seemingly legitimate firms. The SEC is identifying “accounting control frauds” – the frauds that cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined. The SEC is not identifying a few rotten apples, but roughly 100 hedge funds likely to have engaged in accounting fraud. The WSJ describes the SEC’s identification system:

“The list is the low-tech product of a high-tech effort by the SEC to crack down on fraud at hedge funds and other investment firms. After the agency failed to detect the $17.3 billion Ponzi scheme by Bernard L. Madoff, who wowed investors with steady returns over several decades, SEC officials decided they needed a way to trawl through performance data and look for red flags that might signal a possible fraud.

In 2009, the SEC began developing a computer-powered system that now analyzes monthly returns from thousands of hedge funds. Officials won’t say exactly how it works or how much it cost to build, but the agency has announced four civil-fraud lawsuits filed as a result of what it calls the “aberrational performance initiative.”” The SEC should be applauded for finally understanding that “if it’s too good to be true; it probably isn’t true.” Our agency put a similar system in place in 1984 to identify the S&L accounting control frauds that were driving that crisis. A quarter-century later, the SEC began to follow our well-trodden trail – but only with regard to felons inhabiting the middle of the fraud food chain (hedge funds). 

The SEC has, inevitably, discovered that accounting fraud is common among …

[NEW ECONOMIC PROSPECTIVES]

Once gain both the twins were part of the ponzi using MERS, exactly as the rest of the other shareholders (Banks) sought it out to be…a Strawman!

NY Times-

There is so much about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that we should be angry about.

In their heyday, these strange hybrids — part corporation, part government agency — were the biggest bullies in Washington, quick to bludgeon critics who dared suggest that their dual missions of maximizing profits while making homeownership affordable for low- and moderate-income Americans were incompatible. They steamrolled their regulator and pushed back at any suggestion that their capital was inadequate.

[NEW YORK TIMES]

U.S. government investigates mortgage bosses for financial recklessness but are not looking into any jail time.

Leave it up to Abigail to set the record straight!

Abigail C. Field-

The SEC has sued former executives of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for repeatedly lying to investors about their companies’ subprime portfolios. The complaints are very detailed and strong, alleging multiple securities law violations and violations of Sarbanes-Oxley. The complaints try to force the executives to give up their ill-gotten gains, pay penalties, and ban them from being a director or officer of a public company. Interestingly, the complaints are backed by separate cooperation and nonprosecution agreements with each company.

[REALITY CHECK]

Just more of the same, except they still hold millions from the fraud!

Looks like taxpayers will also be picking up this tab!

Reuters-

Six former top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sued by U.S. regulators on charges of misleading investors about the mortgage finance companies’ exposure to risky home loans in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

The case is one of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s biggest actions against high-level financial industry executives, although the regulator did not specify a dollar amount for damages in the alleged fraud. Many lawmakers consider Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at least partly responsible for the 2008 crisis, saying they encouraged lax lending to home buyers that led to a massive real estate bubble.

[REUTERS]

HuffPO- Richard (RJ) Eskow

No financial executives have gone to jail, despite an overwhelming body of evidence indicating that a group of organized “banker gangs” conducted a widespread Wall Street crime wave that made them rich and while throwing millions into poverty. The Justice Department’s failure to act against these bankers is matched only by its declining credibility — a problem it only makes worse whenever it tries to defend itself.

An interview with an outgoing Justice official in today’s Wall Street Journal is merely the latest in a sad parade of weak excuses and implausible arguments, and it comes on the heels of Justice Department official Lanny Breuer’s poor 60 Minutes showing this week on the same topic.

Stop. Just stop. If nobody at Justice can get the job done, it’s time for the Administration to bring in a whole new team and start again. Did everybody in the banking business break the law? No. Very few did. But some of the ones that did appear to be very well-placed, and if they’re not punished they’ll do it again and again.

…

[HUFFINGTONPOST]

WSJ-

A former top U.S. official in charge of investigating the financial crisis said the government has concluded that many inquiries of wrongdoing by financial executives can’t succeed as criminal prosecutions.

“There’s been a realization and a more deliberate targeting by the Department of Justice before we launch criminally on some of these cases” said David Cardona, who was a deputy assistant director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation until he left last month for a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Justice Department has decided it is “better left to regulators” to take civil-enforcement action on those cases, …

[WALL STREET JOURNAL] subscription needed

Judge Rakoff just keeps wowing us, day after day!

Sure he will do all in his power to squirm out of this one.

REUTERS-

Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein may be asked to testify in a market regulator’s insider-trading case against a former director of the Wall Street bank, a judge ruled.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has accused Rajat Gupta, a former board member at Goldman and Procter & Gamble, of giving inside tips about the two companies to his friend Raj Rajaratnam in 2008 and 2009.

[REUTERS]

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

U.S. SECURITIES COMMISSION,
AND
EXCHANGE
Plaintiff,

v-

CITIGROUP GLOBAL MARKETS INC.,
Defendant.
————-

Scribd

Get all these cases away from the regulators reach and into the hands of the people.

One by one they all will go down.

Seek the Truth.

 AP-

A federal judge in New York has struck down a $285 million settlement that Citigroup reached with the Securities and Exchange Commission, citing a need for truth about the financial markets.

Judge Jed Rakoff rejected the settlement Monday. The deal would have imposed penalties on Citigroup even as it allowed the company to deny allegations that it misled investors on a complex mortgage investment. The SEC has accused the bank of betting against the investment in 2007 and making $160 million, while investors lost millions.

The judge wrote that there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth about the financial markets. He set a July 16 trial date for the case.

[ASSOCIATED PRESS]