As it turns out, it can get worse for Ocwen Financial. Less than one day after posting a massive loss for the first quarter of 2016, the nonbank has run afoul of the terms of the National Mortgage Settlement and is now forbidden from taking foreclosure actions on more than 17,000 loans.

According to Joseph Smith, the monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement, Ocwen is not yet back in compliance with one of the performance metrics of the National Mortgage Settlement that it failed in the second half of 2014.

Read on.

In re Williams, 542 B.R. 514 (Bankr. D. Kan. 2015) –

A chapter 13 debtor obtained confirmation of a plan which provided for surrender of his residential property to a secured creditor. The debtor later moved to amend the plan to provide for vesting of title to the property in the creditor, and the creditor objected.

BWU/NEP’s Bill Black appears on Phil Crawford’s Voice of Appraisal. Bill discusses past problems with appraisal fraud and the AMC model. He also explains how he would like to work with appraisers in the future!! The introduction starts at about the 11 minute mark with interview starting around the 15 minute mark.

*Update: Ironically, one of the very first memoranda Barack Obama wrote as president was about the Freedom of Information Act, and contained language very similar to Judge Sweeney’s. “The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.” (Hat-tip to analyst Josh Rosner for pointing this out.)

It’s not quite the Panama papers, but one hell of a big pile of carefully guarded secrets may soon be made public.

For years now, the federal government has been quietly fighting to keep a lid on an 11,000-document cache of government communications relating to financial policy. The sheer breadth of the effort to keep this material secret may not have a precedent in modern presidential times.

“It’s the mother of all privilege logs,” explains one lawyer connected with the case.

The Obama…

The media group that coordinated the Panama Papers investigation into offshore companies said on Thursday it would not participate in a criminal probe by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, wrote to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists seeking additional information from the group to aid his investigation into tax avoidance claims, the Guardian reported on Tuesday.

The group on Thursday told prosecutors in Bharara’s office that it would not release unpublished data to them.

Read on.

Start with having the IRS auditing the banks for possible violation for REMICs. 

The main problem with Wall Street isn’t that, as Bernie Sanders says, the banks are too big to fail. It is that the bankers who run them are too big to nail—to be held financially and personally liable for the bad or corrupt decisions they make. This is now, sadly, documented history. The heart of the subprime mortgage mania—the real reason it could go on for so many years, nearly sinking the world economy in the end—was that no one was really held responsible for any of his or her bad decisions. Ever.

Bank executives weren’t held responsible during the bubble as it was building, when banks stopped caring about their own mortgage lending…

An upcoming seminar co-hosted by Certified Forensic Loan Auditors, LLC

Attorney CLE Credit 6hrs

April 23, 2016 | Los Angeles, CA

9:00am – 4:00pm

Co-Hosted by:

Rodriguez Law Group, Inc.
Certified Forensic Loan Auditors, LLC

Sponsored by:

Read more: http://www.certifiedforensicloanauditors.com/wrongful-foreclosure-lawsuits-04.23.16.html#ixzz46ZxF0ejI

Right after the financial crisis, an SEC lawyer fought a lonely struggle to get his agency to crackdown harder on Goldman bankers. He lost.

Propublica:

In the late summer of 2009, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were preparing to bring charges in what they expected would be their first big crackdown coming out of the financial crisis. The investigators had been looking into Goldman Sachs’ mortgage-securities business, and were preparing to take on the bank over a complex deal, known as Abacus, that it had arranged with a hedge fund. They believed that Goldman had committed securities violations in developing Abacus, and were ready to charge the firm.

James Kidney, a longtime SEC lawyer, was assigned to take the completed investigation and bring the case to trial. Right away, something…

Letter from the Department of Justice to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists stating they have opened an investigation. Photograph: US Department of Justice.

A dark storm is brewing in the world of private pensions, and all hell could break loose when it finally hits.

As the Washington Post reports, the Central States Pension Fund, which handles retirement benefits for current and former Teamster union truck drivers across various states including Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, New York, and Minnesota, and is one of the largest pension funds in the nation, has filed an application to cut participant benefits, which would be effective July 1 2016, as it “projects” it will become officially insolvent by 2025. In 2015, the fund returned -0.81%, underperforming the 0.37% return of its benchmark.

Over a quarter of a million people depend on their pension being handled by the CSPF; for most it is their only source of fixed income.

Read on.