Bill Black has penned yet another patient summary of the staggering evidence of fraud at Citibank, as well as all the many ways that the captured government and regulators have done their best to bury it.
Mr President…you want to leave a legacy that will actually matter for years to come? It is time to do the right thing to end systemic financial fraud in the largest banks. This is foundational to everything else. See: Meet Citi’s ethical underwriters that tried to save it and America
This is the fourth and final column in my series that began by focusing on Richard M. Bowen, III. Bowen blew the whistle on Citi’s sale of scores of billions of dollars in toxic mortgages, primarily to Fannie and Freddie, through fraudulent reps and warranties. After Bowen protested and blew the whistle within Citi to its senior management (including Robert Rubin) – Citi’s senior officers’ classic accounting control fraud strategy expanded both in terms of the volume of sales and the incidence of fraudulent reps and warranties – which rose to 80 percent.
I have explained how Bowen and his boss’ banking careers were destroyed by the retaliation of Citi’s senior managers and how the SEC, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) have followed the disgraceful policy of trying to keep Bowen’s detailed disclosures from becoming public and being used to bring Citi’s criminal controlling officers to justice…
Mr. President, we are fast approaching the most beautiful time of the year in Washington, D.C. when the cherry blossoms emerge. You have a beautiful rose garden that would be the perfect site to award the whistleblowers medals, praise them, call on other Americans to follow their lead, explain exactly how to do so, and promise that DOJ and the SEC will act on any reliable case brought by the whistleblowers. An excellent means of showing your commitment to change would be to announce that you were ordering the immediate restoration of the government banking regulators criminal referral coordinator system, directing the SEC to release all of the information Bowen provided it, and order the release of Bowen’s interviews with the FCIC and his full, original written testimony.
Everyone in America, other than the inhabitants of the C-suites of a few dozen Wall Street banks knows you should do this. There’s only one reason you wouldn’t do so, and that reason is unworthy of our Nation.
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