The courage to stand up for what you believe in

Bharara takes on Bank of America

With the American system of Law as his primary backup Bharara has taken on some of the most ruthless and powerful people in the world. It takes real courage to stand up for what you believe in when you're dealing with people whom have knowingly and willingly broken many laws and to take them on in court, like Bharara did before, bringing Russian crimelords, armsdealers, Jamaican drugkings and Muslim terrorists to justice and before the Manhattan court of Law. Now however he's taken on perhaps the most powerful of all. The ones who even Obama claimed were "too big to fail". Instead of being daunted Bharara contends that noone is too big to be sued.

Bharara's intention is to make it clear that justice is for all and that there are no exceptions in the eyes of the law. "We don't care who you are, how much money you have or who your friends are" He sais.

One billion dollar lawsuit

Top U.S Attorney Bharara has brought a billion dollar civil suit against Bank of America for mortgage fraud during the years around the financial crisis. Countrywide Financial, later bought by Bank of America gave out mortgage loans without making sure that the people could afford them. Said Bharara in a statement to the press: "The fraudulent conduct alleged in today's complaint was spectacularly brazen in scope." Meaning of course that it was huge! Countrywide then sold the loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were effectively nationalized in 2008. That meant that when people defaulted on the loans they couldn't afford in the first place, Uncle Sam was stuck with the bills.

According to the lawsuit Countrywide made use of a method that they called "The Hustle", which was short for "High-Speed Swim Lane". The mortgageloans when being processed could only move forward, never back. Instead of checking wether people could afford the loans and if they had income to match. The loan processors simply entered data into a system that automatically underwrot the loans and the system gave the go-ahead. No checks and balances, widespread falsification of data and the loan processors were given almost no guidance whatsoever. Checklists for making sure the income level that a borrower listed was reasonable in relation to the loan were eliminated. Bonuses for employees were based only on how many loans they could process without any attention to quality.

They knew what they were doing too, the lawsuit contends. A quality review in januari of 2008 showed that a whopping 57% of the Hustle loans went into default. That's a lot of people forced to sell their house folks...

And then they hushed it up

Instead of being alarmed and notifying Fannie and Freddie Countrywide kept on selling thousands of Hustle loans tot Fannie and Freddy. They set about to conceal the shoddy quality of the loans they sold to them. It sais in the lawsuit that Countrywide even offered a bonus to quality-control workers who could "rebut" the default rates in the review.

Bank of America bought Countrywide in July 2008. The lawsuit accuses Countrywide, and later Bank of America, of selling "thousands" of Hustle loans to Fannie and Freddie. According to the lawsuit, Fannie and Freddie don’t review the loans before they purchase them. Instead, they rely on banks’ statements that the loans meet certain qualifications. In other words, they trusted that the banks were telling them the truth about the mortgages and they were defrauded out of a lot of money. One billion dollars worth? We'll see how the case goes.

What being an attorney means to Bharara

Preet Bharara is from Indian descent. His family left India in the seventies to settle on the American east coast. Father Bharara stimulated his children to work hard and do well in school, so that they could reach the American Dream. Both his sons succeeded in doing just that. Starting out with a paper route, Preet's brother Vinit has a very profitable bussiness selling diapers over the internet and Preet himself studied at Harvard and Columbia to reach for his dream: Chasing the bad guys.

What makes the man tick? In his own words: "My job is the greatest privilege I'll ever have. It means I never have to plea something that I don't believe in."