Posted: 09/08/2012 2:42 pm
Barring a "hail mary pass," said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is still ongoing, the members of a task force President Barack Obama formed in January to investigate fraud in the residential mortgage bond industry will instead most likely bring civil lawsuits against some of the banks involved, though it isn't clear when these cases might come.
That means any penalties for those accused of fraud or other misconduct would be measured in dollars, not jail terms.
A spokesman for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, a co-head of the task force and the driving force behind its formation, declined to comment.
Adora Andy, a Department of Justice spokeswoman, said in a statement that "all appropriate remedies, civil and criminal, are on the table."
"As always, if working group members uncover evidence of fraud or other illegal conduct, we will pursue such conduct aggressively," Andy said.
The subprime mortgage bubble popped more than five years ago, triggering a full-fledged economic meltdown. Since then, the question confronting regulators and government prosecutors has been whether the banks that drove the market's expansion simply made terrible business decisions, or committed fraud in order to reap short-term profits.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a number of civil lawsuits, has alleged the latter (as a regulatory agency, the SEC cannot bring criminal suits). But with the exception of one failed case against Bear Stearns in 2009, the Department of Justice, which historically would lead any criminal effort, has declined to criminally prosecute those who created the financial instruments built out of toxic mortgage loans.
By pooling investigative resources, it was hoped that the Justice Department, the SEC and a handful of state attorneys general, led by Schneiderman, could accomplish what the agencies had mostly failed to deliver on their own: a sense of justice, however fuzzily defined.
But from the start, the task force -- officially, the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group -- has been dogged by critics questioning the seriousness of the effort, and by concerns that the legal timeframe in which investigators must bring cases is coming to a close.
Civil cases, if and when they are filed, could lead to large financial penalties and possibly aid for struggling homeowners. Yet it seems unlikely that such a result will satisfy those whose anger sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement, or even many middle-class Americans who may wonder how, in contrast to other financial crises, this one could end with none of the people who seemingly helped orchestrate it behind bars.
"Without accountability, the unending parade of megabank scandals will inevitably continue," Neil Barofsky, the former watchdog over the $700 billion bank bailout fund and a frequent critic of the Obama administration's response to the financial crisis, recently told The Huffington Post.
How and why the government chose this path will be the subject of debate for years to come. Some say prosecutors lacked resources. Others assert that the complexity of the financial transactions makes it virtually impossible to prove criminal intent in court, where prosecutors must convince a jury of guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." In a civil action, by contrast, the bar is lower: jurors need only conclude that "a preponderance of evidence" indicates guilt.
One former prosecutor said a simpler human dimension may also be preventing government lawyers from filing criminal charges: the basic fear of losing a big case.
Read more>> Too Big To Jail: Wall Street Executives Unlikely To Face Criminal Charges, Source Says
