Compliance & Regulation

During these difficult financial times, title agents have created schemes that attempt to steal money from borrowers and financial institutions for their own benefit.

Phil Sotelo, the owner of Realty Executives Sotelo & Associates was arrested for mortgage fraud for recording phony documents at a county office and refused to leave his north Modesto home after it was sold at public auction, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

MDR Mortgage and its founder and president Robert Luce are facing a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice for the alleged misrepresentation of Department of Housing and Urban Development-insured loans.

A new report by Amherst Securities Group examines how the recent Bank of America settlement has the potential to significantly impact Countrywide securities that comprise the Covered Trusts. Although the market seems to treat these securities in the same way, Amherst said that the impact will vary from security to security.

U.S. senior fixed-income investors are taking a more conservative view of cross asset credit conditions on the back of recent macroeconomic concerns, according to a Fitch Ratings fixed-income forum survey of fixed income professionals, conducted in June.

In a major defeat for the National Credit Union Administration, a federal judge Friday agreed to dismiss negligence charges brought by the federal regulator in a civil suit against 11 directors of the one-time $34 billion corporate credit union, all of them prominent figures in the credit union movement.

Texas Tech Federal Credit Union in Lubbock has chosen MRG's Miracle Online platform for its mortgage document preparation needs.

State regulators fined Mortgage Access Corp., an affiliate of realty giant Weichert, $3 million for using unlicensed mortgage originators. The settlement covers 10 states.

The heads of CMBS trading at Citigroup and Goldman Sachs departed from their respective firms late last week.

We must accelerate deleveraging of the U.S. consumer in order to improve not only the U.S. mortgage and housing markets, but also to aid the broader U.S. and global economies. Deleveraging will increase consumer confidence, net worth, job mobility and bank capital levels. But policymakers and economists are fairly ignorant of the mortgage market, which comprises by far the largest part of household credit.