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"SEC Staff to Recommend Civil Charges for Mozilo"
Staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission have decided to recommend filing civil fraud charges against Angelo Mozilo, the co-founder of Countrywide Financial Corp., according to people familiar with the investigation.[...]
From Forbes, January 2008, some background on this white-collar-thug:
"Countrywide’s Mozilo To Leave In Luxury"
Angelo Mozilo made nearly $150 million selling Countrywide shares before they tanked. The mortgage lender’s chief executive can nearly double that windfall and also earn some luxurious perks if he leaves his post following the struggling company’s acquisition by Back of America.
Mozilo will reportedly receive up to $115 million in severance in cash and stock if he resigns or is fired. Mozilo’s future at the company he founded is in doubt after its sale.
On Friday, Bank of America (nyse: BAC – news – people ) confirmed it will buy Countrywide Financial (nyse: CFC – news – people ) for $4.1 billion. Bank of America Chief Executive Ken Lewis has said only that he would like Mozilo to stay at Countrywide until the acquisition closes. Then, "I would guess that he’ll want to go have some fun."[...]
6 Comments
Thanks, Boo. hmmmm..were there others named also to be charged? There had to be a bunch of ‘em contributing to the colossal robbery they pulled off.
scout
Hi scout. I’m worried this leak was manipulation to get Wall Street to pressure Mozilo to plead out, so as to save the
BINO’s (banks in name only)banksters the embarrassment of a trial.I really hope I’m wrong.
Another wild possibility is that this was a pr response to Elliot Spitzer’s terrific performance on Maddow last night. Rahm was scrambling around asking anyone for anything that would make the administration look less complacent.
Good news, thanks Boo. Mozilo is a major fat-cat and deserves the high-profile targeting.
Too bad they are not recommending criminal charges. He belongs in the next cell to Madoff.
The second link is a heavily redacted 54 page PDF of the investigation by the FBI into insider trading at the SEC.
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” In addition, the report says that the female attorney “spent much of her work day e-mailing and searching the Internet about stocks.” It quotes her telling investigators: “It’s my main hobby. It’s my passion.” And: “It’s my way of keeping intellectually above what other people are doing.”
While the woman told investigators she did not check the SEC database – known as EDGAR – for information related to her personal stock trades, the inspector general said computer records reveal that she did, in fact, check the database on at least four separate occasions. SEC employees are prohibited from accessing EDGAR for personal trading purposes.
Said Grassley, “Isn’t it odd that you’ve got people in the prosecuting department that are trying to profit from information that they get from it. Their job is to be prosecuting and not profiteering.”
It’s hard to imagine a more serious violation of the public trust than for the agency responsible for protecting investors to allow its employees to profit from non-public information about its enforcement activities.
Both attorneys – who deny any wrongdoing – still work at the SEC and make six-figure salaries. The investigation was triggered after the high volume of trades by the female attorney set off alarms inside the agency.
As it now stands, there’s no telling how many other employees are not reporting their trades because the SEC has no compliance system in place to monitor the trades of their employees. In fact, the two attorneys under investigation say that no one at the SEC had ever before questioned their reported securities holdings or transactions in the decades they have worked at the commission. “
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories…..4672.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/…..ak_sec.pdf
I agree. Fraud is a criminal offense. And fraud has been committed by thousands in the bank and mortgage businesses, including the top management of every major bank, investment house, hedge fund, private equity firm, and pension fund in the country.