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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - January 27, 2011
Financial Crisis Panel Urges Prosecutions of Industry Figures
by: Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
Washington - The congressional panel examining the root
causes of the nation's financial crisis voted to refer to
state and federal prosecutors a wide range of potential
criminal wrongdoing by financial industry figures and
corporations, people involved in the deliberations said
Tuesday.
The politically divided Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
is likely to detail the referrals on Thursday in releasing
its final report, based on testimony from more than 700
people in coast-to-coast hearings and a review of millions
of pages of documents.
The Huffington Post website first reported on the
commission's referrals Monday evening.
It couldn't be learned which financial executives and
companies were subject of the referrals to the Justice
Department and state attorneys general. The panel
investigated the roles of, among others, subprime mortgage
brokers and lenders; Wall Street giants that bought,
repackaged and resold the loans; bond ratings agencies;
and a huge insurer that wrote protection on dicey bonds,
enabling a U.S. housing bubble to swell until it burst,
crashing the global economy.
Two people who had roles in the deliberations, speaking
on condition of anonymity because the report is still
confidential, said that the panel voted on a number of
the Justice Department referrals months ago.
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"And we've done some more," one of these individuals
said.
The legislation creating the commission, signed by
President Barack Obama on May 20, 2009, charged the
10-member panel to refer to the U.S. attorney general
and appropriate state attorneys general "any person that
the commission finds may have violated the laws of the
United States in relation to (the) crisis."
"We did our duty," said one of the two involved in the
process.
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However, the other knowledgeable person stressed that the
panel's thin investigative staff didn't attempt to compile
evidence for solid criminal cases, but rather referred
information that raised serious legal issues.
The panel sought to model itself after the hard-hitting
Pecora Commission, the Depression-era panel that compiled
evidence leading to prosecutions of high officials of
some of the nation's biggest banks.
However, the Crisis Inquiry Commission's six Democrats and
four Republicans split ideologically in the months after
their appointment. The divisions showed up when Republicans
chose to release their own findings in December, the
original deadline for the final report, and blamed much of
the crisis on the "national home ownership strategy" begun
under President Bill Clinton and on secondary mortgage
giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for jumping into the
subprime market.
Commission members and staff signed agreements to keep
details of the final report confidential until its
release.
However, the New York Times reported late Tuesday that it
had obtained a copy of the 576-page report, which it said
concluded that the financial disaster was "avoidable" and
laid blame on a range of actors from federal regulatory
failures to shoddy mortgage lending and reckless risk
taking.
Commission spokesman Tucker Warren said the report will
be released Thursday and declined to comment further.
(Tish Wells contributed to this article.)
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