Blue Crown Capital | Bank of America liable for Countrywide mortgage fraud
(Reuters) - Bank of America Corp was found liable for fraud on Wednesday over defective mortgages sold by its Countrywide unit, a major win for the U.S. government in one of the few trials stemming from the financial crisis.
After a four-week trial, a federal jury in New York found the bank liable on one civil fraud charge. Countrywide originated shoddy home loans in a process called "Hustle" and sold them to government mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government said.
The four men and six women on the jury also found former Countrywide executive Rebecca Mairone liable on the one fraud charge she faced.
The U.S. Justice Department has said it would seek up to $848.2 million, the gross loss it said Fannie and Freddie suffered on the loans. But it will be up to U.S.
District Judge Jed Rakoff to decide on the penalty. Arguments on how the judge will assess penalties are set for December 5.
Any penalty would add to the more than $40 billion Bank of America has spent on disputes stemming from the 2008 financial crisis.
"The jury's decision concerned a single Countrywide program that lasted several months and ended before Bank of America's acquisition of the company," Bank of America spokesman Lawrence Grayson said. "We will evaluate our options for appeal."
Marc Mukasey, a lawyer for Mairone, called his client a "woman of integrity, ethics and honesty," adding they would fight on. "She never engaged in fraud, because there was no fraud," he said.
Wednesday's verdict was a major victory for the Justice Department, which has been criticized for failing to hold banks and executives accountable for their roles in the events leading up to the financial crisis.
The government continues to investigate banks for conduct related to the financial crisis. The verdict comes as the government is negotiating a $13 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase & Co to resolve a number of probes and claims arising from its mortgage business, including the sale of mortgage bonds.
RISKY LOANS
The lawsuit stemmed from a whistleblower case originally brought by Edward O'Donnell, a former Countrywide executive who stands to earn up to $1.6 million for his role.
The case centered on a program called the "High Speed Swim Lane" - also called "HSSL" or "Hustle" - that government lawyers said Countrywide started in 2007.
The Justice Department contended that fraud and other defects were rampant in HSSL loans because Countrywide eliminated loan-quality checkpoints and paid employees based on loan volume and speed.
The Justice Department said the process was overseen by Mairone, a former chief operating officer of Countrywide's Full Spectrum Lending division. Mairone is now a managing director at JPMorgan.
About 43 percent of the loans sold to the mortgage giants were materially defective, the government said.
Bank of America bought Countrywide in July 2008. Two months later, the government took over Fannie and Freddie.
Bank of America and Mairone denied wrongdoing. Lawyers for the bank sought to show the jury that Countrywide had tried to ensure it was issuing quality loans and that no fraud occurred.
The lawsuit was the first financial crisis-related case against a bank by the Justice Department to go to trial under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA).
The law, passed in the wake of the 1980s savings-and-loan scandals, covers fraud affecting federally insured financial institutions.
The Justice Department, and particularly lawyers in the office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in the Southern District of New York, have sought to dust off the rarely used law and bring cases against banks accused of fraud.
Among its attractions, FIRREA provides a statute of limitations of 10 years and allows the government to bring civil cases for alleged criminal wrongdoing.
Virginia Gibson, a lawyer at the law firm Hogan Lovells, said the Bank of America verdict was a "big deal because it shows the scope of a tool the government has not used frequently since its inception."
Gibson and other lawyers say any appeal by Bank of America would likely focus on a ruling made by the judge before the trial that endorsed a government position that it can bring a FIRREA case against a bank when the bank itself was the financial institution affected by the fraud.
The case was one of three lawsuits in New York where judges had endorsed that interpretation. Banks have generally argued that the interpretation is contrary to the intent of Congress, which they said is more focused on others committing fraud on banks.
Bank of America's case was the first to go to trial, a rarity given that banks more typically choose to settle government claims instead of face a jury. But Bank of America had said that it "can't be expected to compensate every entity that claims losses that actually were caused by the economic downturn."
In a statement, Bharara said Bank of America "chose to defend Countrywide's conduct with all its might and money, claiming there was no case here."
"This office will never hesitate to go to trial to expose fraudulent corporate conduct and to hold companies accountable, particularly when it has caused such harm to the public," Bharara said.
In late afternoon trading, Bank of America shares were down 27 cents at $14.25 on the New York Stock Exchange.
The case is U.S. ex rel. O'Donnell v. Bank of America Corp et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-01422.
OS specific Run configurations
I think it should be possible to have OS specific Run configurations.
So Ctrl + Shift + B does a different command in Windows than in Linux.
Center text around cursor on keystroke
Keep the current position visible in the scroll pane on the right
Sublime Text 2 kept the current scroll position window visible at all times in the scroll pane on the right; bring it back, so I know where I'm at in my files!
Scriptability
On the Mac, I use Alfred a whole lot. I use it to open files using AppleScript, but that is about all I can do with it. I would like to be able to setup default window layouts, but Sublime does not respond to any scripting commands of that nature. I dear say others would like to have some way to control Sublime from the outside using some scripting language (python, node, zsh, etc). On X Windows, this would be easy. But, under OS X, I have not found any way to do it (window layout control). If plugins can control window placement, then it would be easy to write a plugin for this (I think).
entity.name.tag.localname.xml doesn't allow '.' char
The regular expression for matching the xml tag localname isn't correctly.
the '.' is allowed in the localname so the correct expression should be:
(</?)(?:([-_a-zA-Z0-9]+)((:)))?([-_a-zA-Z0-9:\.]+)
If have simply added the \. in the last group ... could you please add this in the XML.tmLanguage file THX ...
And: Sublime text is amazing! I will purchase a licence for Xmas for ME ;)
File doesn't appear in "Find in Files" result if it contains ASCII control character 1C
Snippet for multiply scopes
<snippet>
<content><![CDATA[
${1:var}['${2}']['${3}']
]]></content>
<!-- assert_equal(${1:expected}, ${0:actual}) -->
<tabTrigger>var2</tabTrigger>
<scope>source.php</scope>
<scope>source.html</scope>
<description>$var['']['']</description>
</snippet>
not working for scope.html
how to do it for several scopes
File modified status (*) out of sync on title bar in Linux
Contextual history backtracking for only selected texts leaving history of other text intact
Let say you have some text
-----------------------------------------------
1| psudo code {
2| function of complexity
3| lots of code that i need to make lots of changes to
4| }
5|
6| some other stuff that gets edited in between edits
7| of my psudo function
8|
9|
I want to be able to select my psudo code text block and (crtl/cmd)+z only its history leaving the state of my other code intact.
I understand it is a very complex problem to solve but It would be unbelievably useful and a great time saver.
Implement SlickEdit's "complete-more" command
Each "Open recent" should open the previous last opened
Highlighting within brackets
Hi there,
Currently in sublime you get a little marker to show the start and end of any bracket you are within. () [] or {}
It's handy but when you are in a large file it can be a bit like Where's Wally trying to find the other one sometimes, so I thought it might be nice if you had the option to slightly highlight that section so it's really easy to see where you are.
Just thought this might be kinda cool.
Thanks
Pete
When "finding next", reset x-axis view to 0
When performing a "find next" within a document, if you hit a result that is "offscreen" to the right, the x axis (scrollbar) moves right so you can see the result
Then, when you continue "finding next", the scroll bar remains shifted right to the value of the previous find (which IMO is usually undesirable, since seeing the 0'th column in code is most important to gain your bearing)
My suggestion is to reset the view x-axis to 0 after every "find next"
Vintage mode: make yank work with multiple cursors
When you have multiple cursors and copy then paste with sublime it pastes what each cursor copied. when you enter visual mode with multiple cursors, hit y and then hit p each cursor pastes what was copied from all the cursors one after the other.
Cursor doesn't move when you shift+click to select backwards
Translate Sublime Text 2 to Spanish (Mexico)
I volunteer to translate Sublime Text 2 to Spanish of Mexico. What do you think?
Option to move cursor in spaces as if they were tabs
Would probably make sense to add some kind of mechanics to toggle between the two if you, for whatever reason, want to reach a space in the middle of a bunch of spaces.
Please please add this. I've been changing editor like a million times mainly because of the consistent lack of said feature. If no one else cares to implement it, I will one day I will buckle down and write my editor :)
Thank you
Pelle
Add ability to navigate quick panel using TAB key
When using Vintage mode, I rarely use arrow keys. It would be nice if I could navigate quick panel using TAB key instead.
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