Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million

cr726 · 06-02-2012, 07:52 PM

Shhhhhh

[QUOTE]Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million
Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank. She was a country girl, raised in rural Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason.

She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college. After she had her first child at 17, she needed a job. A friend helped her find one in 1975, processing home loans at a small bank in Alaska. Over the next 30 years, Hunt moved up the ladder to mortgage-banking positions in Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July issue.

On her days off, when she wasn’t fishing with her husband, Jonathan, she rode her horse, Cody, in Wild West shows. She sometimes dressed up as the legendary cowgirl Annie Oakley, firing blanks from a vintage rifle to entertain an audience. She liked the mortgage business, liked that she was helping people buy houses.

[Related: Bank of America whistleblower receives $14.5 million in mortgage case]

In November 2004, Hunt, now 55, joined Citigroup (C) Inc. as a vice president in the mortgage unit. It looked like a great career move. The housing market was booming, and the New York- based bank, the sixth-largest lender in the U.S. at the time, was responsible for 3.5 percent of all home loans. Hunt supervised 65 mortgage underwriters at CitiMortgage Inc.’s sprawling headquarters in O’Fallon, Missouri, 45 minutes west of St. Louis.

Avoiding Fraud

Hunt’s team was responsible for protecting Citigroup from fraud and bad investments. She and her colleagues inspected loans Citi wanted to buy from outside brokers and lenders to see whether they met the bank’s standards. The mortgages had to have properly signed paperwork, verifiable borrower income and realistic appraisals.

Citi would vouch for the quality of these loans when it sold them to investors or approved them for government mortgage insurance.

Investor demand was so strong for mortgages packaged into securities that Citigroup couldn’t process them fast enough. The Citi stamp of approval told investors that the bank would stand behind the mortgages if borrowers quit paying.

At the mortgage-processing factory in O’Fallon, Hunt was working on an assembly line that helped inflate a housing bubble whose implosion would shake the world. The O’Fallon mortgage machinery was moving too fast to check every loan, Hunt says.

Phony Appraisals

By 2006, the bank was buying mortgages from outside lenders with doctored tax forms, phony appraisals and missing signatures, she says. It was Hunt’s job to identify these defects, and she did, in regular reports to her bosses.

Executives buried her findings, Hunt says, before, during and after the financial crisis, and even into 2012.

In March 2011, more than two years after Citigroup took $45 billion in bailouts from the U.S. government and billions more from the Federal Reserve -- more in total than any other U.S. bank -- Jeffery Polkinghorne, an O’Fallon executive in charge of loan quality, asked Hunt and a colleague to stay in a conference room after a meeting.

The encounter with Polkinghorne was brief and tense, Hunt says. The number of loans classified as defective would have to fall, he told them, or it would be “your asses on the line.”

Hunt says it was clear what Polkinghorne was asking -- and she wanted no part of it.

‘I Wouldn’t Play Along’

“All a dishonest person had to do was change the reports to make things look better than they were,” Hunt says. “I wouldn’t play along.”

Instead, she took her employer to court -- and won. In August 2011, five months after the meeting with Polkinghorne, Hunt sued Citigroup in Manhattan federal court, accusing its home-loan division of systematically violating U.S. mortgage regulations.

[Video: Madoff Whistleblower: Big Banks Are Ripping Off Pension Funds]

The U.S. Justice Department decided to join her suit in January. Citigroup didn’t dispute any of Hunt’s facts; it didn’t mount a defense in public or in court. On Feb. 15, 2012, the bank agreed to pay $158.3 million to the U.S. government to settle the case.

Citigroup admitted approving loans for government insurance that didn’t qualify under Federal Housing Administration rules. Prosecutors kept open the possibility of bringing criminal charges, without specifying targets.

‘Pure Myth’

Citigroup behaving badly as late as 2012 shows how a big bank hasn’t yet absorbed the lessons of the credit crisis despite billions of dollars in bailouts, says Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

“This case demonstrates that the notion that the bailed-out banks have somehow found God and have reformed their ways in the aftermath of the financial crisis is pure myth,” he says.

As a reward for blowing the whistle on her employer, Hunt, the country girl turned banker, got $31 million out of the settlement paid by Citigroup.

Hunt still remembers her first impressions of CitiMortgage’s O’Fallon headquarters, a complex of three concrete-and-glass buildings surrounded by manicured lawns and vast parking lots. Inside are endless rows of cubicles where 3,800 employees trade e-mails and conduct conference calls. Hunt says at first she felt like a mouse in a maze.

“You only see people’s faces when someone brings in doughnuts and the smell gets them peeking over the tops of their cubicles,” she says.

Jean Charities

Over time, she came to appreciate the camaraderie. Every month, workers conducted the so-called Jean Charities. Employees contributed $20 for the privilege of wearing jeans every day, with the money going to local nonprofit organizations. With so many workers, it added up to $25,000 a month.

“Citi is full of wonderful people, conscientious people,” Hunt says.

Those people worked on different teams to process mortgages, all of them focused on keeping home loans moving through the system. One team bought loans from brokers and other lenders. Another team, called underwriters, made sure loan paperwork was complete and the mortgages met the bank’s and the government’s guidelines.

Yet another group did spot-checks on loans already purchased. It was such a high-volume business that one group’s assignment was simply to keep loans moving on the assembly line.

Powerful Incentive

Still another unit sold loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the government-controlled companies that bundled them into securities for sale to investors. Those were the types of securities that blew up in 2007, igniting a global financial crisis.

Workers had a powerful incentive to push mortgages through the process even if flaws were found: compensation. The pay of CitiMortgage employees all the way up to the division’s chief executive officer depended on a high percentage of approved loans, the government’s complaint says.

By 2006, Hunt’s team was processing $50 billion in loans that Citi-Mortgage bought from hundreds of mortgage companies. Because her unit couldn’t possibly review them all, they checked a sample.

When a mortgage wasn’t up to federal standards -- which could be any error ranging from an unsigned document to a false income statement or a hyped-up appraisal -- her team labeled the loan as defective.

Missing Documentation

In late 2007, Hunt’s group estimated that about 60 percent of the mortgages Citigroup was buying and selling were missing some form of documentation. Hunt says she took her concerns to her boss, Richard Bowen III.

Bowen, 64, is a religious man, a former Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet at Texas Tech University in Lubbock with an attention to detail that befits his background as a certified public accountant. When he saw the magnitude of the mortgage defects, Bowen says he prayed for guidance.

In a Nov. 3, 2007, e-mail, he alerted Citigroup executives, including Robert Rubin, then chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and a former Treasury secretary; Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden; the bank’s senior risk officer; and its chief auditor.

Bowen put the words “URGENT -- READ IMMEDIATELY -- FINANCIAL ISSUES” in the subject line.

“The reason for this urgent e-mail concerns breakdowns of internal controls and resulting significant but possibly unrecognized financial losses existing within our organization,” Bowen wrote. “We continue to be significantly out of compliance.”
[/QUOTE]

[url]http://finance.yahoo.com/news/woman-who-couldn’t-be-intimidated-by-citigroup-wins--31-million.html?page=1[/url]

cr726 · 06-03-2012, 05:56 PM

I bet there is a lot of Citi employees who took macro economics. :yes:

Ernie · 06-03-2012, 08:00 PM

Will she pay her fair share in taxes?

MnJetFan · 06-03-2012, 08:21 PM

I wonder if Obama will let Citicorp write off the money! He kills them in the press but still takes their money.

cr726 · 06-04-2012, 07:29 AM

Where are all of the guys screaming it's all Barney Frank's fault? What role did the poor have when it comes to Citi? Bueller?

CPA this has nothing to do with pensions.

Tucker134 · 06-04-2012, 08:47 AM

[QUOTE=cr726;4483442]Where are all of the guys screaming it's all Barney Frank's fault? What role did the poor have when it comes to Citi? Bueller?

CPA this has nothing to do with pensions.[/QUOTE]

bad job by Citi in this case...very irresponsible. The banks certainly should share part of the blame for the mortgage mess- but FNMA, Freddie Mac, Barney Frank & the Community Reinvestment Act are all to blame as well- in addition to the morons who took out mortgages they couldn't afford. And the house/condo "flippers" were part of the problem as well...the greater fool mentality was in full effect- of which Elizabeth Warren one!

Jungle Shift Jet · 06-04-2012, 09:29 AM

I say to the poor honest people who intentionally falsified their income and willfully lied to banks to acquire property you could not actually afford you can sleep soundly at night you were innocent bystanders in the whole debacle. You are neither a criminal nor a sinner and the majority of Americans who had to work and save $ for down payments, pay PMI and so forth look up to you as paragons of virtue. It's not your fault that Citi doesn't have your documents that you said existed but never did.

You strawberry pickers who were given title to homes you couldn't even afford to buy the welcome mat for then maxed out HEL\HELOCs on them and ran back to your home country with the cash- I can't blame you or your honest community or political representatives taking advantage of every (D) created redistributive law or policy that forced loser loans to be written to the deserving such as yourself. Banks by design are meant to lend money at a loss. Yes "there is" a lot of Citi employees that never took macroeconomics.

**************

(D) government taking a cut of taxpayer money given to banks they made insolvent - just the vig

cr726 · 06-06-2012, 07:44 PM

Yup, unions and their pensions are destroying the country.

[QUOTE]NY man sentenced in $37M insider trading scheme

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A former mortgage broker was sentenced Tuesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for being the middleman in a $37 million insider trading scheme that federal authorities said was one of the longest-running ever uncovered.

Kenneth Robinson's sentencing in U.S. District court came a day after his two co-conspirators received far lengthier sentences for their role in the 17-year conspiracy.

Former attorney Matthew Kluger, of Oakton, Va., received 12 years, the longest sentence ever handed down in an insider trading case. Former New York stock trader Garrett Bauer received nine years.

The three men admitted using advance information on company mergers provided by Kluger. Robinson, 46, of Long Beach, N.Y., knew both men separately and provided the connection between them.

Kluger admitted passing the information to Robinson, who gave it to Bauer. The trio made an estimated $37 million on trades from 2006 to 2011, according to court documents, which included $11 million on Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009.

Bauer's attorney said in court Monday that his client made a profit of $22 million to $25 million when losses and taxes were factored in.

[B]While the illegal trades charged in the criminal complaint date back to 2006, all three men pleaded guilty to conspiracy dating back to the mid-1990s when Kluger began working at a series of prestigious law firms and had access to privileged information[/B].

The scheme unraveled in 2011 when FBI agents searched Robinson's home. After that, he secretly recorded conversations with Kluger and Bauer for the government.[/QUOTE]

06-02-2012, 07:52 PM	#1
cr726 Jets Insider VIP Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 13,296	Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million Shhhhhh [QUOTE]Woman Who Couldn’t Be Intimidated by Citigroup Wins $31 Million Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank. She was a country girl, raised in rural Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason. She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college. After she had her first child at 17, she needed a job. A friend helped her find one in 1975, processing home loans at a small bank in Alaska. Over the next 30 years, Hunt moved up the ladder to mortgage-banking positions in Indiana, Minnesota and Missouri, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July issue. On her days off, when she wasn’t fishing with her husband, Jonathan, she rode her horse, Cody, in Wild West shows. She sometimes dressed up as the legendary cowgirl Annie Oakley, firing blanks from a vintage rifle to entertain an audience. She liked the mortgage business, liked that she was helping people buy houses. [Related: Bank of America whistleblower receives $14.5 million in mortgage case] In November 2004, Hunt, now 55, joined Citigroup (C) Inc. as a vice president in the mortgage unit. It looked like a great career move. The housing market was booming, and the New York- based bank, the sixth-largest lender in the U.S. at the time, was responsible for 3.5 percent of all home loans. Hunt supervised 65 mortgage underwriters at CitiMortgage Inc.’s sprawling headquarters in O’Fallon, Missouri, 45 minutes west of St. Louis. Avoiding Fraud Hunt’s team was responsible for protecting Citigroup from fraud and bad investments. She and her colleagues inspected loans Citi wanted to buy from outside brokers and lenders to see whether they met the bank’s standards. The mortgages had to have properly signed paperwork, verifiable borrower income and realistic appraisals. Citi would vouch for the quality of these loans when it sold them to investors or approved them for government mortgage insurance. Investor demand was so strong for mortgages packaged into securities that Citigroup couldn’t process them fast enough. The Citi stamp of approval told investors that the bank would stand behind the mortgages if borrowers quit paying. At the mortgage-processing factory in O’Fallon, Hunt was working on an assembly line that helped inflate a housing bubble whose implosion would shake the world. The O’Fallon mortgage machinery was moving too fast to check every loan, Hunt says. Phony Appraisals By 2006, the bank was buying mortgages from outside lenders with doctored tax forms, phony appraisals and missing signatures, she says. It was Hunt’s job to identify these defects, and she did, in regular reports to her bosses. Executives buried her findings, Hunt says, before, during and after the financial crisis, and even into 2012. In March 2011, more than two years after Citigroup took $45 billion in bailouts from the U.S. government and billions more from the Federal Reserve -- more in total than any other U.S. bank -- Jeffery Polkinghorne, an O’Fallon executive in charge of loan quality, asked Hunt and a colleague to stay in a conference room after a meeting. The encounter with Polkinghorne was brief and tense, Hunt says. The number of loans classified as defective would have to fall, he told them, or it would be “your asses on the line.” Hunt says it was clear what Polkinghorne was asking -- and she wanted no part of it. ‘I Wouldn’t Play Along’ “All a dishonest person had to do was change the reports to make things look better than they were,” Hunt says. “I wouldn’t play along.” Instead, she took her employer to court -- and won. In August 2011, five months after the meeting with Polkinghorne, Hunt sued Citigroup in Manhattan federal court, accusing its home-loan division of systematically violating U.S. mortgage regulations. [Video: Madoff Whistleblower: Big Banks Are Ripping Off Pension Funds] The U.S. Justice Department decided to join her suit in January. Citigroup didn’t dispute any of Hunt’s facts; it didn’t mount a defense in public or in court. On Feb. 15, 2012, the bank agreed to pay $158.3 million to the U.S. government to settle the case. Citigroup admitted approving loans for government insurance that didn’t qualify under Federal Housing Administration rules. Prosecutors kept open the possibility of bringing criminal charges, without specifying targets. ‘Pure Myth’ Citigroup behaving badly as late as 2012 shows how a big bank hasn’t yet absorbed the lessons of the credit crisis despite billions of dollars in bailouts, says Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “This case demonstrates that the notion that the bailed-out banks have somehow found God and have reformed their ways in the aftermath of the financial crisis is pure myth,” he says. As a reward for blowing the whistle on her employer, Hunt, the country girl turned banker, got $31 million out of the settlement paid by Citigroup. Hunt still remembers her first impressions of CitiMortgage’s O’Fallon headquarters, a complex of three concrete-and-glass buildings surrounded by manicured lawns and vast parking lots. Inside are endless rows of cubicles where 3,800 employees trade e-mails and conduct conference calls. Hunt says at first she felt like a mouse in a maze. “You only see people’s faces when someone brings in doughnuts and the smell gets them peeking over the tops of their cubicles,” she says. Jean Charities Over time, she came to appreciate the camaraderie. Every month, workers conducted the so-called Jean Charities. Employees contributed $20 for the privilege of wearing jeans every day, with the money going to local nonprofit organizations. With so many workers, it added up to $25,000 a month. “Citi is full of wonderful people, conscientious people,” Hunt says. Those people worked on different teams to process mortgages, all of them focused on keeping home loans moving through the system. One team bought loans from brokers and other lenders. Another team, called underwriters, made sure loan paperwork was complete and the mortgages met the bank’s and the government’s guidelines. Yet another group did spot-checks on loans already purchased. It was such a high-volume business that one group’s assignment was simply to keep loans moving on the assembly line. Powerful Incentive Still another unit sold loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the government-controlled companies that bundled them into securities for sale to investors. Those were the types of securities that blew up in 2007, igniting a global financial crisis. Workers had a powerful incentive to push mortgages through the process even if flaws were found: compensation. The pay of CitiMortgage employees all the way up to the division’s chief executive officer depended on a high percentage of approved loans, the government’s complaint says. By 2006, Hunt’s team was processing $50 billion in loans that Citi-Mortgage bought from hundreds of mortgage companies. Because her unit couldn’t possibly review them all, they checked a sample. When a mortgage wasn’t up to federal standards -- which could be any error ranging from an unsigned document to a false income statement or a hyped-up appraisal -- her team labeled the loan as defective. Missing Documentation In late 2007, Hunt’s group estimated that about 60 percent of the mortgages Citigroup was buying and selling were missing some form of documentation. Hunt says she took her concerns to her boss, Richard Bowen III. Bowen, 64, is a religious man, a former Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet at Texas Tech University in Lubbock with an attention to detail that befits his background as a certified public accountant. When he saw the magnitude of the mortgage defects, Bowen says he prayed for guidance. In a Nov. 3, 2007, e-mail, he alerted Citigroup executives, including Robert Rubin, then chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and a former Treasury secretary; Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden; the bank’s senior risk officer; and its chief auditor. Bowen put the words “URGENT -- READ IMMEDIATELY -- FINANCIAL ISSUES” in the subject line. “The reason for this urgent e-mail concerns breakdowns of internal controls and resulting significant but possibly unrecognized financial losses existing within our organization,” Bowen wrote. “We continue to be significantly out of compliance.” [/QUOTE] [url]http://finance.yahoo.com/news/woman-who-couldn’t-be-intimidated-by-citigroup-wins--31-million.html?page=1[/url]

06-04-2012, 09:29 AM	#7
Jungle Shift Jet Occasionally stoops to uploading hotties pix to boost his postcount All Pro Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Alive with a superior intellect in an erudite world of fine tastes that you will never, EVER acquire Posts: 5,038	I say to the poor honest people who intentionally falsified their income and willfully lied to banks to acquire property you could not actually afford you can sleep soundly at night you were innocent bystanders in the whole debacle. You are neither a criminal nor a sinner and the majority of Americans who had to work and save $ for down payments, pay PMI and so forth look up to you as paragons of virtue. It's not your fault that Citi doesn't have your documents that you said existed but never did. You strawberry pickers who were given title to homes you couldn't even afford to buy the welcome mat for then maxed out HEL\HELOCs on them and ran back to your home country with the cash- I can't blame you or your honest community or political representatives taking advantage of every (D) created redistributive law or policy that forced loser loans to be written to the deserving such as yourself. Banks by design are meant to lend money at a loss. Yes "there is" a lot of Citi employees that never took macroeconomics. ************** (D) government taking a cut of taxpayer money given to banks they made insolvent - just the vig Last edited by Jungle Shift Jet; 06-04-2012 at 09:34 AM.

06-03-2012, 05:56 PM	#2
cr726 Jets Insider VIP Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 13,296	I bet there is a lot of Citi employees who took macro economics. :yes:

06-03-2012, 08:00 PM	#3
Ernie Seeks the Truth!!! Rookie Join Date: Sep 2009 Posts: 847	Will she pay her fair share in taxes?

06-03-2012, 08:21 PM	#4
MnJetFan All League Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 4,302	I wonder if Obama will let Citicorp write off the money! He kills them in the press but still takes their money.

06-04-2012, 07:29 AM	#5
cr726 Jets Insider VIP Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 13,296	Where are all of the guys screaming it's all Barney Frank's fault? What role did the poor have when it comes to Citi? Bueller? CPA this has nothing to do with pensions.

06-04-2012, 08:47 AM	#6
Tucker134 Let's go Isles! All League Join Date: Dec 2007 Location: NYC Posts: 2,984	[QUOTE=cr726;4483442]Where are all of the guys screaming it's all Barney Frank's fault? What role did the poor have when it comes to Citi? Bueller? CPA this has nothing to do with pensions.[/QUOTE] bad job by Citi in this case...very irresponsible. The banks certainly should share part of the blame for the mortgage mess- but FNMA, Freddie Mac, Barney Frank & the Community Reinvestment Act are all to blame as well- in addition to the morons who took out mortgages they couldn't afford. And the house/condo "flippers" were part of the problem as well...the greater fool mentality was in full effect- of which Elizabeth Warren one!

06-06-2012, 07:44 PM	#8
cr726 Jets Insider VIP Join Date: Jan 2005 Posts: 13,296	Yup, unions and their pensions are destroying the country. [QUOTE]NY man sentenced in $37M insider trading scheme NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A former mortgage broker was sentenced Tuesday to 2 1/2 years in prison for being the middleman in a $37 million insider trading scheme that federal authorities said was one of the longest-running ever uncovered. Kenneth Robinson's sentencing in U.S. District court came a day after his two co-conspirators received far lengthier sentences for their role in the 17-year conspiracy. Former attorney Matthew Kluger, of Oakton, Va., received 12 years, the longest sentence ever handed down in an insider trading case. Former New York stock trader Garrett Bauer received nine years. The three men admitted using advance information on company mergers provided by Kluger. Robinson, 46, of Long Beach, N.Y., knew both men separately and provided the connection between them. Kluger admitted passing the information to Robinson, who gave it to Bauer. The trio made an estimated $37 million on trades from 2006 to 2011, according to court documents, which included $11 million on Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2009. Bauer's attorney said in court Monday that his client made a profit of $22 million to $25 million when losses and taxes were factored in. [B]While the illegal trades charged in the criminal complaint date back to 2006, all three men pleaded guilty to conspiracy dating back to the mid-1990s when Kluger began working at a series of prestigious law firms and had access to privileged information[/B]. The scheme unraveled in 2011 when FBI agents searched Robinson's home. After that, he secretly recorded conversations with Kluger and Bauer for the government.[/QUOTE]