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by William D. Cohan October 28, 2012 from Bloomberg Website
Illustration by Pete Gamlen
Remember
Richard Bowen?
Day 1, Panel 1 from C-SpanVideo Website
Bowen was the chief underwriter in the business unit that bought some $50 billion annually in home mortgages from third parties that were then bundled up and sold as securities to investors the world over.
On Nov. 3 he sent an “urgent” e-mail to executives including Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who was then chairman of the bank’s executive committee, and Gary Crittenden, the chief financial officer, raising concerns about,
Bowen wrote that he had been “agonizing for some time” about the problem, especially since his direct superiors at the bank, whom he had warned repeatedly since he first discovered the problem in mid-2006, had done little or nothing to remedy it.
What he had discovered was that 60 percent of the home mortgages that Citigroup had bought from third parties, or $30 billion, were “defective,” meaning that they didn’t meet Citigroup’s underwriting criteria.
Nevertheless, they were still packaged up - defects and all - and sold as securities.
Almost Nothing
You know where this is going. The Citigroup executives did next to nothing.
Rubin, who left the company in January 2009, told the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on April 8, 2010, that,
Commission Chairman Phil Angelides asked Rubin to follow up with his commission and explain precisely what actions Citigroup took in response to Bowen’s e-mail.
A few months later, Rubin’s attorneys sent a letter stating that the,
A Nixonian response if ever there was one.
Citigroup’s attorneys, in turn, wrote to the commission in November 2010 that the bank had responded to Bowen’s e-mail by firing “the head of the group” responsible for evaluating the credit quality of the purchased mortgages - actually, Bowen had done that already - and by putting in place a bunch of new “processes.”
Yet according to a July 2012 article in Bloomberg Markets magazine by Bob Ivry about Sherry Hunt, who worked for Bowen,
By the time of Rubin’s FCIC testimony, of course, Citigroup had been bailed out with $45 billion in cash from the American people, along with another $306 billion in guarantees from the federal government for a pot of the very same toxic home mortgages that Bowen had warned about.
Rubin pocketed $126 million in his 10 or so years at the company. Bowen, who was stripped of his responsibilities at Citigroup soon after writing the infamous e-mail, left the company two weeks after Rubin.
He now teaches accounting at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Warning Ignored
As horrific as it was for Rubin, Crittenden and others to ignore Bowen’s explicit warning, that’s not the end of the story.
As part of blowing the whistle on Citigroup’s bad behavior, Bowen also alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the bank’s main regulator, hoping it would thoroughly investigate the “breakdowns of internal controls” and take legal action against those responsible.
Before the bailout of Citigroup, he gave the SEC two long depositions and 1,000 or so pages of documents, some of which were taken from the Internet, detailing the extent of Citigroup’s problems and Bowen’s attempts to rectify them. Importantly, he said he also gave his permission for the SEC to release to the public his depositions and the revealing documents.
Naturally, the SEC did nothing to pursue Bowen’s claims before billions of taxpayer dollars were used to rescue Citigroup.
But it must abide by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows the public to gain access to documents such as those Bowen provided. It has a horrendous track record of fulfilling FOIA requests in anything like a timely manner. My experience has been that the agency begrudgingly gives out the bare minimum long after I really needed it.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg’s Ivry filed a FOIA request with the SEC to get copies of Bowen’s two depositions and the 1,000 pages of documents.
Ivry wanted to know just what Bowen had discovered about Citigroup’s bad behavior in the years leading up to its bailout. Initially, the SEC stonewalled, claiming that the Bowen cache amounted to Citigroup “trade secrets.”
When Ivry finally got his FOIA documents back from the SEC, he was underwhelmed.
Needless to say, he was unable to get any additional insight into what Bowen had uncovered and was unable to inform the rest of us.
Unreleased Documents
When I told Bowen, earlier this week, that the SEC had failed to release his documents and his testimony about Citigroup to Ivry, he was flabbergasted. For legal reasons, Bowen said, he can’t share the information directly, but he fully expected the SEC to make it available to journalists and the public.
He also expected the SEC to investigate the wrongdoing.
Last week, I filed my own FOIA request for Bowen’s documents and testimony.
On Oct. 22, I received an acknowledgement letter from the agency. My tracking number is 13-00937-FOIA. Trust me, I’ll let you know if the SEC gives me anything more than it gave Ivry.
But I won’t be counting on it...
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