Courtesy of Pam Martens
Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase
The previous time a female lawyer who worked at JPMorgan Chase blew the whistle on frauds occurring inside the bank, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with other federal and state regulators, ended up charging the bank with selling toxic mortgage securities to investors and making JPMorgan Chase pay $13 billion to settle the charges.
That female lawyer was Alayne Fleischmann, as Matt Taibbi detailed in a report for Rolling Stone in 2014. Taibbi summarizes the matter as follows:
“Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as ‘massive criminal securities fraud’ in the bank’s mortgage operations.”
According to Fleischmann, who worked as a Transaction Manager at JPMorgan, her department was assigned with assuring that only good mortgage loans were securitized but, instead, under pressure from bosses, it waived in improperly underwritten mortgages that were likely to default. After failing to stop the fraudulent process with verbal warnings, Fleishmann memorialized the details in a long letter to a superior. She found herself dismissed in a round of layoffs.
On Thursday, a female attorney, Shaquala Williams, who had worked in compliance at JPMorgan Chase, came forward. Williams has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York with allegations that are so alarming that they should send the Justice Department, the bank’s outside auditing firm and the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors into a frenzy. (See the full text of William’s federal complaint here.)
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