Courtesy of Pam Martens
Michael Corbat, CEO of Citigroup Since 2012
On October 11 of last year, in a bland press release that drew little mainstream media attention, the Federal regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, announced that Citibank had agreed to pay a $30 million fine over charges that it held homes on which it had foreclosed off the market for more than the statutory holding period of five years. Citibank is the federally-insured, deposit-taking bank that is part of the serially-miscreant Wall Street mega bank, Citigroup.
The action comes at a time when rents are rising dramatically across the U.S. as a result of a shortage of affordable homes to purchase.
What is extremely troublesome about the OCC’s action, and which continues a trend among federal bank regulators in the Trump administration, is just how little the regulators are willing to share with the American people in terms of facts about the continuing illegal conduct of these mega Wall Street banks. That obfuscation comes simultaneously with the Trump administration’s efforts to further deregulate these serially-charged behemoths.
The OCC Consent Order in this case says only that it involved “over 200 violations alone between April 4, 2017 and August 14, 2019.” But Citigroup/Citibank foreclosed on thousands of homes during and after the financial crash in 2008, often using an alias of Liquidation Properties, Inc., which it hid its connections to. The OCC Consent Order suggests that the bank only held hundreds of homes illegally off the market. But if the OCC had gone back further in time, would the number be in the thousands? And just how long were the homes kept off the market after Citibank foreclosed? Was it six years or ten years or 15 years? The OCC is silent on these critical points.
We broke the story in 2009 about how Citigroup/Citibank was conducting its foreclosures during the financial crisis under the alias of Liquidation Properties, Inc. (LPI). While LPI had made filings in U.S. District Courts and with Secretaries of State attesting that it was not a “party, a parent, a subsidiary or other affiliate of a publicly owned corporation,” Citigroup’s December 31, 2008 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission listed Liquidation Properties Inc. as a subsidiary. Citigroup, then and now, traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “C,” and was most assuredly a publicly owned corporation. In addition, LPI’s officers were employees of Citigroup with the same street address as its investment bank.
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