Wells Fargo's "Reprehensible" Foreclosure Crimes….(And Your Government Working With Them)

Two bankruptcy cases in Louisiana that have revealed systematic, persistent foreclosure abuses by Wells Fargo have gotten enough media attention that it is inconceivable that banking regulators don’t know about them. The lack of any intervention, or even so much as a throat-clearing by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is yet another proof of how the regulator apparently sees its role as fronting for banks rather than enforcing rules.
This story is back in the news thanks to an appeals court smackdown of Wells, which has engaged in a long-standing war of attrition with one of the plaintiffs, a Michael Jones. The reason for the appeal was that the bank was fighting the judge’s imposition of punitive damages of $3.1 million for Wells’ ” reprehensible” conduct.
We wrote about the underlying case a year ago. Bankruptcy judge, Elizabeth Magner of the Eastern District of Louisiana, had found Wells Fargo guilty of egregious foreclosure abuses in a 2007 case, Jones v. Wells Fargo. In it, the bank admitted that the types of overcharges it made in bankruptcy cases were ” part of its normal course of conduct, practiced in perhaps thousands of cases.” The judge awarded damages and recovery of attorney fees on top of repayment of the impermissible charges, and ordered the bank to fix its accounting.
Fast forward four months, and another case appears in Mangers’s court with the same sort of verboten charges, proving that Wells has not taken the required corrective measures
Read more at https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/04/wells-fargos-reprehensible-foreclosure-abuses-prove-incompetence-and-collusion-of-occ.html#eoiU5DEZfKx1WcDg.99