| We didn't hear much about this in the MSM over the past few years 'cos it was mostly Friends of Bill and other well-connected Dems running things at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. |
Fannie Mae erased $6.3 billion in profit in a long-awaited restatement Wednesday capping the accounting scandal that stunned financial markets and brought the ouster of top executives and a record fine against the government-sponsored mortgage leader. The correction of its earnings from 2001 through June 30, 2004, ordered by the Securities and Exchange Commission two years ago, was well below Fannie Mae's earlier estimate of $10.8 billion. The reworking of its accounting is costing the company some $1 billion this year to conduct. It is the first earnings statement filed by Fannie Mae, which finances one of every five home loans in the United States, since late 2004.The scandal erupted in the fall of that year when federal regulators accused Washington-based Fannie Mae — with its long-standing prestige, vaunted political clout and reputation for financial excellence — of serious accounting problems and earnings manipulation to meet Wall Street targets.Last May, the federal agency that regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, its smaller sibling in the $8 trillion home-mortgage market, issued a blistering report alleging a six-year accounting fraud at Fannie Mae, the second-largest U.S. financial institution after Citigroup Inc. Regulators said the scheme included manipulations to reach quarterly earnings targets so that company executives could pocket hundreds of millions in bonuses from 1998 to 2004.Fannie Mae paid a record $400 million civil fine in a settlement with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight and the SEC. It also agreed to limit the growth of its multibillion-dollar mortgage holdings, capping them at $727 billion, and to make top-to-bottom changes in its corporate culture, accounting procedures and ways of managing risk. The completion of the restatement "is a key step forward for the company and represents two years of hard work," OFHEO Director James B. Lockhart said in a statement Wednesday. "Much remains to be done. ... Fannie Mae faces enormous challenges in fixing its operational and risk management systems, in (financial controls) compliance, and in producing audited financial statements for 2005 and 2006." In detailing its restatement, Fannie Mae cited a $7 billion net decrease from previously reported earnings for periods prior to 2002, a $705 million reduction for 2002, a $176 million increase for 2003 and a $1.2 billion increase for the first six months of 2004.Freddie Mac, which also is government-sponsored and has its stock publicly traded, had its own accounting scandal that came to light in June 2003. The company misstated earnings by some $5 billion — mostly underreported — for 2000-2002 to smooth out volatility in profit and uphold its image on Wall Street as a steady performer.Over the last two years, Fannie Mae has disclosed a passel of new accounting problems that had been uncovered in several areas, including its core business of issuing securities backed by the billions of dollars of home mortgages annually that it buys from lenders and bundles together for resale to investors worldwide. Other problems were revealed in loans, houses acquired through foreclosures, interest on delinquent home loans and reverse mortgages. They all were in addition to the accounting-rule violations that came to light in September 2004 involving derivatives, the financial instruments that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac use to hedge against swings in interest rates.Fannie Mae's chief executive Franklin Raines, a prominent Washington figure who was White House budget director in the Clinton administration, was swept out of office in December 2004 along with then-chief financial officer Timothy Howard.
Lockhart has said his agency was considering suing former executives to recover tainted bonus money if Fannie Mae failed to recoup it.Fannie Mae escaped criminal prosecution over the accounting failure. The Justice Department had pursued a criminal investigation, but federal prosecutors said in August that they had shut down their probe without bringing any action. The SEC still could bring civil actions against individual executives, including people no longer at Fannie Mae, with the burden of proof less stringent than in criminal prosecutions.| Do you remember reading about *any* of this??????????? |
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