Two other mortgage division leaders, Mary Haggerty and Baron Silverstein, were not named defendants in the lawsuit.
AMBAC Assurance Corp., a company that guaranteed some of Bear’s mortgage bonds and went bankrupt in 2010, accused Bear of fraud in a separate lawsuit that described actions by the six mortgage division leaders. AMBAC emerged from bankruptcy in May.
Yet all six continue to work at the top levels of their field, earning salaries and bonuses that have allowed them to live in luxury while the mortgages that made up the bonds they sold have defaulted at alarming rates.
“How is it that we could say that we learned something from the last crisis when we still have the same people running our companies for the future?” asked Jordan Thomas, a former attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission who now runs the whistleblower practice at Labaton Sucharow in New York.
Thomas Marano, who led Bear’s mortgage finance division, is perhaps the most telling example.
In the past four years he earned more than $29 million as head of Residential Capital, LLC, the mortgage subsidiary of the former General Motors Acceptance Corp. (GMAC), which was bailed out by the government during the financial crisis. ResCap filed for bankruptcy last year.
As global head of mortgages, asset-backed securities and commercial mortgage-backed securities at Bear Stearns, he oversaw the underwriting and securitization of subprime loans from Bear’s mortgage subsidiary EMC Mortgage Corp.
His division oversaw the mortgage operation from start to finish. EMC would make or purchase mortgage loans, then pool thousands of them into mortgage backed securities, register them with the SEC and then sell them to investors.
The FHFA, along with the State of New York, mortgage insurers, and other federal agencies and investors, said in lawsuits that Bear falsely assured investors and insurers in customer disclosures and SEC filings that the loans were subjected to rigorous underwriting standards.
The lawsuits said Marano’s unit was so hungry for new loans to securitize that they let the standards slide and knowingly included bad loans in mortgage pools.
Marano personally signed the SEC filings on at least $8.7 billion worth of residential mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to documents included in the FHFA lawsuit.
“Defendants falsely represented that the underlying mortgage loans complied with certain underwriting guidelines and standards, including representations that significantly overstated the ability of the borrowers to repay their mortgage loans,” the lawsuit states.
Marano, the company and all the other defendants “deny there was an abandonment of reasonable due diligence procedures,” according to court documents.
“Individual defendants deny that the securitizations … contained material misstatements of fact or omissions of fact,” the defendants’ response to the FHFA complaint filed in court reads.
Marano also directed executives to withhold “every fee” from credit rating agencies that had lowered the ratings on the firm’s mortgages bonds, according to the AMBAC complaint.
In the majority of the securities signed by Marano, more than half the loans were delinquent, in default or foreclosed by July 2011, according to figures the FHFA included in its lawsuit.
Marano, who has a 4,700-square-foot home in New Jersey and a vacation home in Park City, Utah, declined to comment for this story. He sold the New Jersey house to Old Pike Associates LLC, a limited liability corporation, for $99 in 2002 and the LLC also owns the Utah house. Old Pike’s address is Marano’s home address and the company lists Marano as CEO.
Marano is managing member of another LLC, Old Pike Associates II, LLC, which was formed in March 2012. The company bought a $4.2 million dollar home in Tenafly, N.J., in December 2012, according to public records.
When Bear went under, “everybody and their brother descended on the place,” looking to hire the best talent, said Chad Dean, managing partner of Integrated Management Resources and a banking recruiter for 11 years.
“Nobody should be surprised that Bear Stearns people are still all over the Street in high-level positions at other firms,” Dean said. “It’s very competitive. There’s resumés flying all over the place.”
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led some of the most thorough inquiries into the causes of the financial crisis, echoed that.
“Just because Bear Stearns went out of business doesn’t mean everybody who worked for Bear Stearns was incompetent,” he said. He declined to discuss Marano and his colleagues specifically.
Warren Spector, who was co-president of Bear Stearns until he was fired in August 2007, said Marano was seen in the industry as a “rock star.”
“He knew the business inside and out, and he could do every job, up and down the line,” Spector said. “He was one of the best managers Bear Stearns ever had.” Spector said he has no knowledge of the specific accusations against Marano in any lawsuits.
Republished from: Global Research
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