Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Richard Bowen
Richard Bowen, Testifying Before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
This past Sunday the PBS documentary produced by WNET, New York, about Sherry Hunt, one of my former chief underwriters (Sherry blew the whistle on Citigroup four years after I was thrown out for warning about their bad mortgages), and myself aired on KERA Channel 13, Dallas PBS.
The documentary, entitled “The Whistleblower,” is the first episode in a three-part PBS series called Playing by the Rules: Ethics at Work. It has aired in New York and several other cities around the country and in Dallas this past weekend, with most of the PBS stations airing it this month. You can watch it here and on the WNET website.
Sherry Hunt was a vice president and chief underwriter at CitiMortgage in O’Fallon, Missouri. Since 2005 she had flagged defects; 50 % of the loans she saw had defects, fraudulent defects. She complained and was ignored. I became her boss in 2006 and learned of her concerns which were also expressed by others.
I dug deeper, and it was worse than I could ever have imagined. While we reported that 95% of our mortgages met our policies, in reality, 60 % (growing to 80 %) of the mortgages did not. And yet Citi was certifying to the purchasers of many billions of dollars of these mortgages that they met our policies.
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