InfoBytes Blog
Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group Announces Several New Cases
On November 20, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, one of the Co-Chairs of the federal-state Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) Working Group, announced a new case filed in the New York State Supreme Court alleging Martin Act violations by a securities firm and several of its affiliates in connection with the offering of RMBS. The complaint charges that the firms made fraudulent misrepresentations and omissions to promote the sale of RMBS to private investors and deceived investors regarding the care with which the firms evaluated the quality of loans included in certain RMBS offerings. The suit claims that investors suffered cumulative losses over $11 billion on RMBS sponsored and underwritten in 2006 and 2007. The DOJ’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, of which the RMBS Working Group is a part, noted the significant federal-state coordination that led to the filing, including the “significant” contributions of the FHFA’s Inspector General, as well as assistance from the SEC and Assistant U.S. Attorneys from across the country.
On November 16 the SEC announced that it had obtained more than $400 million from two firms alleged to have misled investors in RMBS. In cases coordinated with the RMBS Working Group, the SEC charged that both firms failed to fully disclose their bulk settlement practices, which involved retaining cash from the settlement of claims against mortgage loan originators for problem loans that the firms had sold into RMBS trusts, and which they no longer actually owned. The SEC also claimed, among other things, that one of the firms misstated information concerning the delinquency status of loans that served as collateral for an RMBS offering it had underwritten, while the second firm allegedly applied different quality review procedures for loans that it sought to put back to originators and instituted a practice of not repurchasing such loans from trusts unless the originators had agreed to repurchase them.