http://www.alternet.org/investigations/ ... leblowers/
people wonder why that "mob," all those "dirty, lazy hippies," are protesting wall street? well, in part because of **** like this.
. . .investigators uncovered what they believed was evidence that branch employees had used scissors, tape and Wite-Out to create fake bank statements, inflated property appraisals and other phony paperwork. Inside the heaps of paper, for example, they found mock-ups that indicated to investigators that workers had, as a matter of routine, literally cut and pasted the address for one home onto an appraisal for a completely different piece of property . . . Eileen Foster, the company’s new fraud investigations chief, had seen a lot of slippery behavior in her two decades in the banking business. But she’d never seen anything like this.
She began to get pushback from company officials who were unhappy with the investigation . . .By early 2008, she’d concluded that many in Countrywide’s chain of command were covering up massive fraud within the company — outing and then firing whistleblowers who tried to report forgery and other misconduct . . . By the fall of 2008, she was out of a job too. Countrywide’s new owner, Bank of America Corp., told her it was firing her for “unprofessional conduct . . . Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor ruled that Bank of America had illegally fired her as payback for exposing fraud and retaliation against whistleblowers. . . .
A former underwriting manager in northern California, for example, claimed Countrywide retaliated against her after she sent an email to the company’s founder and chief executive, Angelo Mozilo, about questionable lending practices. The ex-manager, Enid Thompson, warned Mozilo in March 2007 that “greedy unethical people” were pressuring workers to approve loans without regard for borrowers’ ability to pay . . .Within 12 hours, Thompson claimed, Countrywide executives began a campaign of reprisal . . . Corporate minions, she charged, ransacked her desk, broke her computer and removed her printer and personal things . . . Soon after, she said, she was fired. Her lawsuit was resolved last year. The terms were not disclosed.
By 2004, Countrywide had become a player in the market for subprime deals and other nontraditional mortgages, including loans that didn’t require much documentation of borrowers’ income and assets. These loans were part of the plan for meeting its CEO’s audacious goal of growing his company from a giant to a colossus. Mozilo had vowed that his company would double its share of the home-loan market . . .by 2008.
For example, Countrywide approved a loan for a borrower whose application listed him as a dairy foreman earning $126,000 a year, according to a legal claim later filed by Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Co., a mortgage insurer. It turned out that the borrower actually milked cows at the dairy and earned $13,200 a year, the lawsuit alleged. The borrower provided the correct information, but the lender booked the loan based on data that inflated his wages by more than 800 percent, the legal claim said.
. . . according to a former manager cited as a “confidential witness” in shareholders’ litigation [9]against the company, employees appeared to be involved in a “loan flipping” scheme, persuading borrowers to refinance again and again, giving them little new money, but piling on more fees and ratcheting up their debt . . . when the scheme was pointed out to Lumsden, Countrywide’s subprime loan chief, the response was “short and sweet”: “Fund the loans.” Such episodes weren’t uncommon, the witness said.
wow .......In Chicago, the suit said, Countrywide’s business partners included a mortgage broker controlled by a five-time convicted felon. One Source Mortgage Inc.’s owner, Charles Mangold, had served time for weapons charges and other crimes, the suit said. One Source received as much as $100,000 per month in fees from Countrywide, banking as much as $11,000 for each loan it steered . . .Countrywide in turn funded a stream of loans arranged by One Source, the suit said, even as the broker misled borrowers about how much they’d be paying on their loans and falsified information on their loan applications. . . . Some cases involved mortgage brokers or in-house staffers who pressured real-estate appraisers to inflate property values. The company maintained a “do not use” list of crooked appraisers who’d been caught falsifying home values, but the sales force often ignored the list and used these appraisers anyway . . .