FBI on Fannie, Freddie and 24 others’ trail
Courtesy of Accountancy Age and The Independent, it seems the FBI is taking a keen interest in the collapse of certain US banks and other financial institutions. Those named so far include Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, New Century Financial and Countrywide Financial. According to those reports (The Independent):
Investigators at the FBI are combing documents and emails related to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and AIG and the events leading to the nationalisation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as they widen the search for executive wrongdoing that may have contributed to the credit crisis…
And the FBI said it had widened an already-sprawling investigation into the crisis..
The FBI has already launched more than 500 prosecutions of players at the sharp end of the mortgage crisis – the mortgage brokers and appraisers who helped foist millions of inappropriate loans on people who could never afford to pay them back. It has 1,400 open investigations…The FBI is examining whether senior executives knew more about the parlous state of their companies’ finances than they let on to the public and to shareholders.
It is serious stuff when the FBI gets involved rather than the SEC which normally handles cases of corporate misfeasance. They must be expecting criminal prosecutions. I note that so far, the Big 4 have escaped attention but I wonder how long it will be before the US government enforcers take a hard look at their activities. I sincerely hope that we don’t see a paper shredding exercise unravel as was the case with Anderson’s in the immediate post-Enron mess. But then history does have a habit of repeating itself.
Related articles by Zemanta
- FBI Probing Companies At Heart Of Meltdown
- FBI is reviewing troubled banks for accounting issues
- FBI Investigating Failed, Bailed, Financial Firms [Fbi]
- FBI investigating Wall Street
- FBI probing bailout firms
- ProPublica: The FBI to the Rescue
- FBI investigates four Wall Street firms over sub-prime meltdown
- FBI probing companies at heart of financial meltdown
- U.S. grand jury probes subprime lenders
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=08bbe49e-cd40-463a-8200-3b3b20f7b3e6)
About This Post
[...] in the recent days “precipitated” this “crisis.” Well, I say you should bring in the the whole army, if only they weren’t in Iraq. Anyone remember we have a war going on and soldiers and [...]
I know nothing about due process in cases like this, but might I suggest that the FBI is an institutional publicity whore and the hot ticket for Joe Public this season is those grubby Wall Street bankers? A government agency would never start sniffing around cases just because it made them (and their next appropriations request) look good, would it? Especially when the SEC has been painted as being asleep at the wheel of balsa-wood butane tanker in the middle of a Girl Guide jamboree…
Reply