The NY Times today has a 4-page article about a man who investigated Fannie Mae
on his own and found abuses and illegal procedures long before the housing crisis.
There is a lot of repetition in the article, but the gist seems to be that
"mortage servicing companies" were playing lose and fast (an illegally) with their duties and responsibilities.
Investigations by this man and others were given to Fannie Mae, but it is unclear
that the contents of the reports made their way up to the Board of Directors.
It's an interesting read...
NY Times
GRETCHEN MORGENSON
February 4, 2012
A Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded
Quote:
YEARS before the housing bust — before all those home loans turned sour
and millions of Americans faced foreclosure — a wealthy businessman in Florida set out
to blow the whistle on the mortgage game.
His name is Nye Lavalle, and he first came to attention not in finance but in sports and advertising.
He turned heads in marketing circles by correctly predicting that Nascar and figure skating
would draw huge followings in the 1990s.
But after losing a family home to foreclosure, under what he thought were fishy circumstances,
Mr. Lavalle, founder of a consulting firm called the Sports Marketing Group,
began a new life as a mortgage sleuth. In 2003, when home prices were flying high,
he compiled a dossier of improprieties on one of the giants of the business, Fannie Mae.
In hindsight, what he found looks like a blueprint of today’s foreclosure crisis. Even then, Mr. Lavalle discovered,
some loan-servicing companies that worked for Fannie Mae routinely filed false foreclosure documents,
not unlike the fraudulent paperwork that has since made “robo-signing” a household term.
Even then, he found, the nation’s electronic mortgage registry was playing fast and loose with the law
— something that courts have belatedly recognized, too
<snip>
|