Finally: Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo to face the SEC for fraud

November 6, 9:45 AMLA Fraud ExaminerMonique Bryher

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After what seems to be an eternity to jilted investors and an army of employees who lost their jobs, former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo was denied his request to dismiss charges of securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission by U.S. District Judge John F. Walter. This means Mozilo, who has fought the SEC’s lawsuit, initiated this past June, alleging that Mozilo and former Countrywide CFO Eric Sieracki and former COO David Sambol misled investors about Countrywide’s financial condition.

Mozilo, who founded Countrywide in 1969 and built a sandcastle of an empire on making loans to people with low credit scores, is the name most credited with laying the foundation for both the run-up in housing prices in the early 2000s and the inevitable bubble burst and collapse of the real estate market. Intentionally or not, he also created a new industry - mortgage modifications - that has spawned another wave of fraud against consumers.

Note: the creation of FICO scores by Fair Isaac is a time-proven means of measuring the risk of lending money. That the vast majority of lenders threw out the use of the scores and just plain common sense about lending large sums of money to unresponsible people shows the power of peer pressure and herd mentality.

See also: California Real Estate Fraud Report