BB&T Corp. said it received two subpoenas from the Justice Department in November and December seeking additional information related to a federal audit of its government-backed loan business.
Chief Executive Kelly King had said the company was notified late in the second quarter that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was auditing BB&T’s FHA-insured loan origination process.
Wells Fargo & Co. said a long-running lawsuit by Federal Housing Administration against the bank may take even longer to resolve after settlement discussions fell apart.
The San Francisco-based bank, which has been in litigation with the FHA since 2012, said in its annual report that the “previous resolution discussions” with the FHA “did not result in an acceptable final agreement” and that the bank is “again engaged in discovery.”
Wells Fargo had been in talks with the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York and the Justice Department for months over allegations it improperly certified certain FHA mortgage loans for U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development insurance that didn’t qualify for the program.
The government alleges Wells Fargo shouldn’t have received insurance proceeds from HUD when some of the loans later defaulted.
He is back! The banksters worse nightmare.
Benjamin Lawsky is just getting warmed up.
New York’s top financial watchdog is aiming new proposals at big banks as part of an anti-money-laundering crusade that has already made him one of the most feared men on Wall Street.
Lawksy’s office is considering holding senior executives personally accountable for the “adequacy and robustness” of systems designed to detect questionable banking in foreign countries.
The superintendent of the Department of Financial Services said his agency is also weighing conducting random audits of firms to catch suspect dealings.
This is nothing but political… Federal Reserve Chiefs and U.S. Treasury Chiefs’ meetings has gone way back. Where were the outcry by Congress when there were meetings with the U.S. Treasury heads with Greenspan, Bernanke, Volcker, etc.?
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Several House Republicans asked Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Wednesday to release transcripts of her regular meetings Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, in a contentious hearing.
The House Financial Services hearing, the second of Yellen’s two-day trip to Capitol Hill to present semiannual monetary policy testimony, came as House Republicans have passed several pieces of legislation aimed at reforming the Fed in recent years only to see them go nowhere in the Senate.
They seem eager to try again now that Republicans control both chambers.
“Fed reform is coming,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services panel.
Rep. Bill Huizenga, a Republican from Michigan, and Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey, asked Yellen if she would be “willing to share” what she discussed with Lew, in the name of greater transparency. Fed chairmen and Treasury secretaries have met regularly going back to former Fed chair Alan Greenspan. Yellen and Lew meet most but not every week, officials say.
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Yellen said monetary policy was off-limits during her meeting with Lew.
“I do not discuss monetary policy or actions that we are going to take with the secretary or with the executive branch,” Yellen said.
“We confer about the economy and the financial system on a regular basis. We participate jointly in many international meetings, including those of the G-7 and G-20. And we confer on matters that are coming before those groups,” she said.
The Fed Chairwoman said she was not in favor of releasing any summary of the meeting.
“These are private one-on-one meetings and I don’t think it’s appropriate,” she said.
“If I had breakfast with you,” she told Garrett, “I would not make a transcript of what we discussed over breakfast.”
More from Marketwatch. Click here.
Following recent leaked files confirming yet again that HSBC had helped over a hundred thousand individuals evade taxes and/or engage in outright international money laundering, evasion which may have involved the CEO Stuart Gulliver himself, leading to a scandal which has caught some of the most prominent names in UK media, with allegations flying that the Telegraph was biased in its coverage of the HSBC scandal due to a loan made to its owners, all of which is nothing surprising per se, but merely the culmination of decades of HSBC enabling criminal activity around the globe (and collecting a hefty fee for its help), it is time for another song and dance to appease the angry mob, if only for the next week or so until the popular attention span shifts over to the next scandal du jour.
Which for today means that two top HSBC execs will appear briefly in UK parliament to testify before the Treasury committee, in a televized webcast set to start momentarily.
As the Guardian summarizes, CEO Stuart Gulliver and Chairman Douglas Flint will be grilled about the revelations that HSBC’s Swiss arm helped wealthy customers avoid taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets. They’ll also face questions on how the division was able to advise clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, as exposed by leaked files from 2005 to 2007.
The committee extended the session from 45 minutes to 2 hours last night, and announced that Gulliver would be attending; originally Flint was due to be alone. Both men can expect tough scrutiny over Swiss tax revelations, and the wider culture at one of the world’s largest banks.
HSBC Chairman Douglas Flint and Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver told a panel of UK lawmakers they shared collective responsibility for failings at HSBC’s Swiss bank that allowed clients to dodge taxes.
“It clearly was unacceptable, we very much regret this and it has damaged HSBC’s reputation,” Gulliver told the Treasury Committee with regard to practices in its Swiss bank in the mid-2000s.
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Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and other agencies have been under pressure from lawmakers over why only one HSBC Swiss client had been prosecuted for tax evasion and why the bank itself had not faced more scrutiny.
HMRC said in a statement on Wednesday that it had arranged a meeting with other agencies “to discuss how the stolen HSBC Suisse data can be shared with them.”
The meeting will include the Serious Fraud Office, which investigates financial crime, UK financial regulator the Financial Conduct Authority, the Crown Prosecution Service, the City of London Police, the National Crime Agency and EuroJust, which co-ordinates investigation of serious crime across the EU.
Reuters) – A prominent investor in Wal-Mart Stores Inc (>> Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is pushing ahead with a campaign to link a portion of executive compensation to staff motivation, a sign that the retailer’s wage hike last week won’t end outside pressure over employee pay and benefits.
Connecticut Treasurer Denise Nappier, whose office oversees $40 million worth of Wal-Mart shares in state pension and trust funds, in December submitted a proposal calling for the incentive pay of senior executives to be tied in part to a measure of “employee engagement”, according to previously unreported filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wal-Mart is fighting to keep this and other select proposals off the ballot for its annual meeting in June, filings show. Because the Walton family controls a majority of shares, outside proposals can be easily defeated even if they are put to a vote, and in any case are usually non-binding.
A low hanging fruit exec…
LAS VEGAS (AP) – Authorities say a former Bank of America executive from North Las Vegas used the bank’s funds to pay off two loans when the borrowers were unable.
Justice Department officials said Tuesday that 39-year-old Justin T. Brough pleaded guilty to misapplication of bank funds. Officials say Brough admitted to arranging two loans worth $6.4 million for borrowers who didn’t qualify, falsifying documents with forged signatures.
Authorities say Brough was a business banking marketing executive who provided services to wealthy clients.
justiceleague00
Justice League 