POP!"...
Posted on 05/23/2006 9:17:32 AM PDT by AdamSelene235
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Employees at mortgage giant Fannie Mae manipulated accounting so that executives could collect millions in bonuses as senior management deceived investors and stonewalled regulators at a company whose prestigious image was phony, a federal agency charged Tuesday.
The blistering report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the product of an extensive three-year investigation, was issued as the government-sponsored company struggles to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal.
Earlier, a person familiar with the situation said that Fannie Mae was being fined between $300 million and $500 million for the alleged manipulation of accounting to facilitate executives' bonuses, in a settlement with the housing oversight agency.
"The image of Fannie Mae as one of the lowest-risk and 'best in class' institutions was a facade," James B. Lockhart, the acting director of OFHEO, said in a statement as the report was released. "Our examination found an environment where the ends justified the means. Senior management manipulated accounting, reaped maximum, undeserved bonuses, and prevented the rest of the world from knowing."
The report also faulted Fannie Mae's board of directors for failing to exercise its oversight responsibilities and failing to discover "a wide variety of unsafe and unsound practices" at the largest buyer and guarantor of home mortgages in the country.
The OFHEO review, involving nearly 8 million pages of documents, details what the agency calls an arrogant and unethical corporate culture. From 1998 to mid-2004, the smooth growth in profits and precisely-hit earnings targets each quarter reported by Fannie Mae were "illusions" deliberately created by senior management using faulty accounting, the report says.
The accounting manipulation tied to executives' bonuses occurred from 1998 to 2004, according to the report, a much longer period than was previously known.
Regulators had earlier said that Fannie Mae in 1998 improperly put off accounting for $200 million in expenses to future periods so executives could collect $27 million in bonuses.
"By deliberately and intentionally manipulating accounting to hit earnings targets, senior management maximized the bonuses and other executive compensation they received, at the expense of shareholders," the report says. The manipulation "made a significant contribution" to the compensation of former chairman and chief executive Franklin Raines, which totaled more than $90 million from 1998 to 2003, it says, including some $52 million directly tied to the company hitting earnings targets.
Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions that helped the company meet the 1998 earnings targets, according to congressional testimony by the former director of OFHEO. The agency first discovered in 2004 the accounting-rule violations and alleged earnings manipulation by Fannie Mae to meet Wall Street targets -- disclosures that stunned the financial markets.
In December 2004, the SEC ordered Fannie Mae to restate its earnings back to 2001 -- a correction expected to reach an estimated $11 billion. The Justice Department has been pursuing a criminal investigation.
Raines and former chief financial officer Timothy Howard were swept out of office by Fannie Mae's board in December 2004.
OFHEO levied a record $125 million fine in 2003 against Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae's smaller rival in the multitrillion-dollar home mortgage market, for misstating earnings -- mostly underreporting them -- by $5 billion for 2000-2002.
On Friday, Fannie Mae said it was replacing the chairman of its board's audit committee, a key position as the second-largest U.S. financial institution reworks its accounting and struggles to emerge from the scandal. The company said the board had named accounting professor Dennis Beresford to replace audit committee chairman Thomas Gerrity.
Jamie Gorelick of FBI "Able Danger" and 9/11 comission fame wrote the legal guidelines for Fannie Mae.
She was an ACLU porn lawyer before becoming a Clinton appointee and justice dept official.
... and how much of it he had to kick back and to whom ...
RAINES= Prison
Raines will never join Lay, Kowalski, and the guy from Worldcom as the poster boys for unethical business for one obvious reason. Of course, one is not allowed to say what it is.
You don't think old Franklin kept his? Do you suppose he kept it in his freezer?
This was Democrat (meaning socialist) hacks and operatives who plundered Fanni Mae. Not businessmen.
I looked at the equity to debt ratios and fannie is levered 10 times more than freddie from what I can tell.
May I, in the friendliest way possible, suggest that you read up on the FTCM debacle in 1998 (couple of good books, not to mention an article or two of mine(g!)).
The lesson to be learned here, aside from internal corruption (which, oddly enough, LTCM weren't, they were straight-as-a-string traders until they got in over their heads), is this:
When it comes to portfolios that are heavily involved in high-leverage derivatives, ordinary business school stats such as debt-equity are 100% meaningless. Why? Because neither potential debt nor actual equity can be measured by any 'hard' methodolgy. One must deal (perhaps undesirably) with econometric models, and therefore the solvency of any such enterprise as these is dependent ENTIRELY on the accuracy of the model in use.
If overgearing (over-leveraging, in American English) can kill off an organisation of the smartest men, best traders, and finest theoreticians in the history of the world, then it can and will, one day, kill off a bunch of mediocre MBAs who couldn't find work in the private sectore, and almost surely much more quickly than such a policy killed off the 'smart guys'.
Fan, Fred, and Sal are all in this boat right now, have been for years AND their leverage has grown over the years, not shrunk (as it EFFING SHOULD HAVE, particularly after March 2000). The yield curve is going against them. These were ill-conceived ''quasi-private'' corporations to start, and they all operate under the **assumption** -- nothing written in law at all -- that if they get BIG enough, and subsequently fail, we taxpayers will be on the hook.
Sod them. Fannie was more blatantly corrupt (still is, I daresay), and violated its charter more than Freddie.
And they are both (as is Sallie) far too leveraged to withstand ANY sort of hiccup in their very curious derivatives exposure...absent of course the Regress bailing their sorry asses out with your and my money.
I think we could survive a freddie or sallie hiccup. They are much smaller than fannie. If fannie implodes, it could be the end of the world as we know it, depending on exactly how bad a shape fannie is in.
The pure derivatives damage from a Freddie crash would not sink the economy by itself, you're exactly right.
For some reason, though, you seem to omit from your view the very same 'fear contagion' factor that has infamously pushed even a relatively over-supplied WTI mkt above $70/bbl.
(referring to physical futures mkts)...''Bull markets result from fear. Wildly overdone bull markets feed on themselves and the fear of the market participants that they might not be able to acquire the goods they need in future. When fear rules markets, there is no top end.'' -- SAJ, in Trading Options To Win, John Wiley & Sons, 2003.
He paid off Bill Clinton.
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