![]() ![]() “This was exemplary conduct,” says BC Law Professor Patricia McCoy, an expert in banking and banking regulation. The founder and chairman of Abacus Bank, Thomas Sung. And they advised the borrowers to report the matter to the police. They notified their mortgage financer Fannie Mae. They hired an outside consultant to investigate, which resulted in more firings and several resignations. They reported the incident to the bank’s compliance officer. In December of 2009, Thomas’ daughter Vera, a member of the bank’s board of directors, and her sister Jill, the bank’s president and CEO, discovered that, in an otherwise routine home mortgage closing, a low-level employee was embezzling funds. But Thomas Sung’s hands were clean.Ībacus continued about its business. Millions lost their homes, their savings, their livelihoods. When the housing bubble burst, the world tumbled into financial crisis. Abacus never invested in mortgage-backed securities, nor did it ever originate any subprime mortgages. I do not think that these are sound securities.”Īnd that was that. “I go back a lot longer than seven years,” Thomas told him, “and I have seen defaults where home prices drop by as much as 35 percent. There hasn’t been a default in seven years. In a follow-up conversation, Thomas asked the broker what happens if the loans behind the securities defaulted. Days later, a large binder reached his desk, filled with pages of impenetrable fine print. In 2006, a broker from Chicago had tried to sell him highly rated mortgage-backed securities boasting a 12 percent yield. Thomas could have jumped on the bandwagon. A notable exception was the founder and chairman of Abacus Bank, Thomas Sung. The US economy was booming.įew people questioned whether any of this was wise. Lured by the rising values of their rapidly appreciating homes, homeowners went on a consumer spending spree. These subprime mortgages were pooled together into securities and sold as investments. In the dizzy years before the great depression of 2008, lenders were pumping up a speculative housing bubble and getting very, very rich by predatorily throwing mortgages at homebuyers with poor credit ratings. More than that, the story of Abacus and the Manhattan DA’s office is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a culturally distinct community of immigrants seeks to share in the American dream, and a zealous prosecutor’s office concludes that its efforts to do so are criminal. The case is the subject of the PBS documentary Abacus: Small Enough to Jail that has been nominated for an Acacemy Award. Invoking the 2008 mortgage debacle, DA Vance said, “If we’ve learned anything, it’s that at some point, these schemes unravel and taxpayers are left holding the bag.”Ībacus, which was founded by the father of Vera Sung ’90 and Chanterelle Sung ’04, was, and remains, the only bank indicted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The indictment claimed that the bank had falsified loan applications so that unqualified borrowers could obtain home mortgages, and then sold these fraudulent mortgages to the Federal National Mortgage Association-Fannie Mae-the alleged victim. The charges: 184 counts of falsifying business records, and of residential mortgage fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy. announced the indictment of Abacus Federal Savings Bank plus nineteen of its former employees, including the head of the loan department. The date was May 31, 2012.Īt a splashy press conference, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. ![]() Cameras flashed as they held on to each other, hunched over, trying to cover their faces. Fifteen Chinese-Americans were handcuffed, chained together, and paraded by law enforcement down the narrow hallway of a New York City courthouse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |