Reply #95: Class Action Lawsuit Against Countrywide: California

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Class Action in California against Countrywide

Class Action Lawsuit Against Countrywide: California in

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=168698

Class Action Lawsuit Against Countrywide: California
The Market Ticker ® - Commentary on The Capital Markets
Posted 2010-10-09 20:31
by Karl Denninger
in Foreclosuregate
Class Action Lawsuit Against Countrywide: California

This is an extremely-important case folks. The pleadings here, like the case in Kentucky, lay the table in terms of the games that were played during the "Rah-Rah" years.

Let's start with the "meat" of the alleged violations:



And the first "meaty" part of the complaint....

5. The fraud perpetrated by the Countrywide Defendants from 2003 through 2007, including by BofA starting no later than 2007, was willful and pervasive. It begin with simple greed and then accelerated when Countrywide founder and CEO Angelo Mozilo (“Mozilo”) discovered that Countrywide could not sustain its business, unless it used its size and large market share in California to systematically create false and inflated property appraisals throughout California. Countrywide then used these false property valuations to induce Plaintiffs and other borrowers into ever-larger loans on increasingly risky terms. As Mozilo knew from no later than 2004, these loans were unsustainable for Countrywide and the borrowers and to a certainty would result in a crash that would destroy the equity invested by Plaintiffs and other Countrywide borrowers.


In other words, Countrywide is alleged to not only have made bad loans, but also to have intentionally inflated appraisals.

6. Hand-in-hand with its fraudulently-obtained mortgages, Mozilo and others at Countrywide hatched a plan to “pool” the foregoing mortgages and sell the pools for inflated value. Rapidly, these two intertwined schemes grew into a brazen plan to disregard underwriting standards and fraudulently inflate property values – county-by-county, city-by-city, person-by-person – in order to take business from legitimate mortgage-providers, and moved on to massive securities fraud hand-in-hand with concealment from, and deception of, Plaintiffs and other mortgagees on an unprecedented scale.


Oh, that's rich. So not only (it is alleged) did Countrywide bamboozle borrowers, they also bamboozled investors.


9. It is now all too clear that this was the ultimate high-stakes fraudulent investment scheme of the last decade. Couched in banking and securities jargon, the deceptive gamble with consumers’ primary assets – their homes – was nothing more than a financial fraud perpetrated by Defendants and others on a scale never before seen. This scheme led directly to a mortgage meltdown in California that was substantially worse than any economic problems facing the rest of the United States. From 2008 to the present, Californians’ home values decreased by considerably more than most other areas in the United States as a direct and proximate result of the Defendants’ scheme set forth herein. The Countrywide Defendants’ business premise was to leave the borrowers, including Plaintiffs, holding the bag once Countrywide and its executives had cashed in reaping huge salaries and bonuses and selling Countrywide’s shares based on their inside information, while investors were still buying the increasingly overpriced mortgage pools and before the inevitable dénouement. This massive fraudulent scheme was a disaster both foreseen by Countrywide and waiting to happen. Defendants knew it, and yet Defendants still induced the Plaintiffs into their scheme without telling them.

There's the base of it all....

24. Defendants have gone to great lengths to avoid producing documents in this litigation because they know that such documents will establish all details of the massive fraud they perpetrated on Plaintiffs and other Californians. PennyMac, the Granada Network and Defendants’ overseas operations are used by Defendants to systematically hide documents. By delaying production of documents, the Defendants are buying time as they (a) accept the benefits of the scheme described herein, (b) cover up their fraud, and (c) make it materially more expensive and difficult for Plaintiffs and their counsel to obtain a just result.