The big-four audit firm PwC is being sued for $5.5 billion over its failure to detect a fraud that resulted in a bank collapse during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. This is the biggest lawsuit in PwC history.

The complainant is Taylor, Bean & Whitaker (TBW), which was a top-10 wholesale mortgage lending firm. The trustees of the company are accusing PwC of negligence in their audits of TBW’s lender, Colonial Bank.

In an agreement between the top management of the borrower and the bank, starting from 2002, TBW chairman Lee Farkas sent mortgage data to Colonial Bank for fake loans or those the company had already committed or sold to other investors. By the end of 2007, the scheme had helped the bank accumulate about $1.5 billion in fake or impaired loans.

Read on.

(CN) — Homeowners can sue Bank of America for claims it feigned compliance with a mortgage assistance plan that was a condition of the bank’s $45 billion bailout in 2008, the 10th Circuit ruled Monday.
Bank of America hired Urban Settlement Services dba Urban Lending Solutions to administer its Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP.
The bank was required to participate in HAMP as a condition of receiving a $45 billion bailout from the federal government to shore up the bank’s bad loans during the 2008 financial crisis. The government also guaranteed $118 billion in potential losses at the bank.
HAMP required Bank of America to collect financial information from at-risk borrowers, and evaluate their eligibility for a loan modification that would allow them to pay a lower interest on their mortgage.
The program allowed eligible borrowers to enter a trial period plan to demonstrate their ability to make lower…

Can be assessed on DCLeaks website.

Despite talk of “recovery,” former homeowners remain scarred after their government abandoned them

DAVID DAYEN

“I have been fighting this bank for over five years now. I am finally losing everything to their fraud.”

“We feel captive in our own home.”

This is a sampling of what I have awakened to practically every day for the past few months, since my book “Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud” came out. Hundreds of people have emailed me, sent me letters, attended my public events, to relate their personal horror stories of foreclosure and dispossession. They come from across America, from different social and economic backgrounds. Some lost everything, and some haven’t given up.

They contact me, a non-lawyer who has only written about and not participated in their struggle, because they have been abandoned, by…