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]

REUTERS-

The U.S. government is not taking advantage of an enforcement tool that could potentially hold top Wall Street figures accountable for their role in the recent financial crisis, despite its prior success.

Broker-dealers, investment advisers, and others regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission are required to supervise their representatives. If a trader engages in misconduct, the SEC can sue the management with “failure to supervise.”

[REUTERS]

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

Rolling Stone-

Federal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.

  [ROLLING STONE]

It won’t be fun for Citigroup Inc. and the Securities and Exchange Commission to defend their proposed $285 million settlement at a Wednesday court hearing ordered by a very skeptical federal judge.

WSJ-

U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff could kill the deal if he doesn’t like what he hears.

But coming up with the proper penalties to end civil enforcement cases by the SEC is complicated.

SEC officials consider nine factors, including losses suffered by investors as a result of the alleged wrongdoing. The agency also weighs how much the company benefited from the behavior and whether investors will be …

[WALL STREET JOURNAL]

A sweet piece from Fmr. U.S. Senator from Delaware Ted Kaufman-

Here’s the highlight of his HuffPo piece-

Biden, Schneiderman and a few other AGs see it differently. They have been insisting on further investigations before any settlement is reached. The charges in Biden’s suit against MERS include a series of allegations based on his investigations to date. Among them:

• Hiding the true mortgage owner and removing that information from the public land records.

• Creating a systemically important, yet inherently unreliable, database that created confusion and inappropriate assignments and foreclosures of mortgages.

 • Failing to ensure the proper transfer of mortgage loan documentation to the securitization trusts, which may have resulted in the failure of securitizations to own the loans upon which they claimed to foreclose. (This is called “securities fail” and is the theory that allows put backs that crush the bank/originators.)

 • Initiating foreclosures in the name of MERS without authority to do so or without appropriate controls to ensure the actions were being carried out by the actual owner of the mortgage.

 • Allowing the entry and management of data by those MERS members who are identified as owners or servicers in the MERS System, instead of controlling entry and management itself.

 • Initiating foreclosure actions in which the real party in interest was hidden, thus preventing homeowners from ascertaining who owned their mortgage in order to challenge whether or not they had a right to foreclose and limiting their legal defenses.

 Again, stay tuned. Together, Judge Rakoff and Attorney General Biden are finally demanding much of the information we need to truly reform Wall Street.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION,

Plaintiff

-against-

RAJAT K. GUPTA and
RAJ RAJARATNAM,

Defendants.

Scribd

Something new every s-i-n-g-l-e day…

Businessweek-

Oct. 19 (Bloomberg) — Citigroup Inc. has agreed to pay close to $300 million to resolve U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that it misled investors about a financial product linked to risky mortgages, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The settlement is subject to approval by the SEC commissioners, who were scheduled to vote on it today, the person said, declining to be identified because the matter isn’t public. One Citigroup executive and an employee from another firm involved in the deal are also named in the SEC’s claims, according to the person.

[BUSINESSWEEK]

Why aren’t we surprised? Staff?

(Reuters) –

The Securities and Exchange Commission is warning staffers that their personal brokerage account information may have been compromised, after it uncovered security flaws with an ethics compliance program.

The SEC put the program in place after its internal watchdog raised concerns about possible insider trading among SEC staffers.

[REUTERS]