Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Amy Friend, Chief Counsel of the OCC, and former Managing Director at Promontory Financial Group
President Obama has promised Americans greater transparency in their government and a crackdown on wrongdoing on Wall Street. What Americans have received instead is a dark curtain drawn around how Federal banking regulators settle cases against Wall Street and zero criminal prosecutions by the U.S. Justice Department against any major Wall Street executive. Both of those realities share a common factor: the powerful Wall Street law firm, Covington & Burling.
On January 9 of this year, it was announced that Julie Williams, the Chief Counsel of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) who had stepped down the prior summer, was taking a job as a Managing Director at Promontory Financial Group. The OCC is the regulator of national banks which, along with the Federal Reserve Board, had announced two days prior that it was abruptly dropping its discredited Independent Foreclosure Review program and instituting a settlement with large banks and mortgage servicers. The Independent Foreclosure Review had racked up $2 billion in fees for the outside consultants hired to do the foreclosure reviews while not one cent had flowed to foreclosure victims.
By February of this year, the OCC and Federal Reserve settlement included 13 large banks and mortgage servicers. It promised to provide more rapid monetary restitution to foreclosure victims. The deal was structured as $3.6 billion in cash and $5.7 billion in soft dollars, such as loan modifications and principal reduction. That deal has turned out to be a sham as well.
As Chief Counsel of the OCC since 1994, Julie Williams had played a key role in crafting the agreement to hire so-called “independent” foreclosure reviewers to root out foreclosure abuse at the banks and servicers. One of the most discredited of those was Promontory Financial Group, the company Williams was now joining in a highly lucrative position.
Promontory had done the foreclosure reviews for Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC. In the case of Bank of America, the process was completely discredited by a series of articles by Paul Kiel at ProPublica in the fall and winter of 2012. Bank of America, according to documents revealed by Kiel, had been allowed by its “independent” consultant to hire its own reviewers and perform the bulk of the tests to determine if foreclosure harm had occurred.
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