Bank Bailout 2: Obama Lets Mortgage Abusers Off the Hook Leave No One Accountable

[sabrina 1]

40. It's not clear in the article, that the immunity from charges re robo-signing

is only civil? This is what it says about robo-signing:

The immunity the banks receive for this payment is fairly narrow, certainly in comparison to what had been rumored earlier. The banks will only be released from investigations and charges related to foreclosure fraud and robo-signing—not all the malfeasance leading up to the crash, like the origination and securitization of bad mortgages.

That is not clear imo. But hopefully you are right.



The only case so far of a CEO charged in the Robo-signing fraud which happened just a few days ago:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/07/robo-signing-docx-missouri_n_1261369.html

The bolded excerpt does seem to confirm that it is only civil immunity though:

For the first time since the start of the robo-signing crisis, a senior executive has been indicted on criminal charges of forgery and faces jail. The forgery charges against a mortgage processing executive come as the nation's largest banks attempt to close the books on a civil investigation into widespread document fraud and could spark further federal criminal cases.

A grand jury in Missouri handed up the 136-count indictment late last week charging Georgia-based DocX -- a subsidiary of the massive mortgage processor Lender Processing Services -- and its founder and former president Lorraine O. Brown, with forgery. The indictment alleges that DocX employees fabricated signatures on hundreds of real estate documents, some used in foreclosures.

"This is the first time any grand jury in the country has indicted a corporation or a high-level executive at a corporation for 'robo-signing,'" Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster told The Huffington Post. "The grand jury is alleging that the documents have false signatures on them, that the notarizations are fraudulent and that it was all done with an intent to deceive. If that’s true, it makes the [foreclosure] documents forgeries."

I hope it is only Civil. This is a better deal than the original one, and kudos to Schneiderman and Harris for holding out to improve it. But imo, there should have been no deals made and let the law take its course as it does for the rest of us.