“No, no, no, we didn’t do anything wrong,” he tells Bloomberg about claims that Countrywide precipitated the housing market crisis by issuing loans for houses that were grotesquely overpriced to borrowers that could not possibly have paid the money back. “Countrywide or Mozilo didn’t cause any of that.”
Mozilo settled with the SEC back in 2010 for around $67 million but, like all other top financial execs responsible for the mortgage crisis, has escaped any criminal prosecution from a Justice Dept. that was too terrified of wreaking further havoc in the banking world.
With regard to reports that the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles is now planning to sue him for his misdeeds in the lead-up to the spectacular failure of Countrywide and its loan servicing portfolio that was once worth around $1.5 trillion, Mozilo tells Bloomberg, “You’ll have to ask those people, ‘What do you have against Mozilo, what did he do?’… Countrywide didn’t change. I didn’t change. The world changed.”
He says he’s being punished for running a successful company.
“Should Amazon be condemned for being the biggest in their space?” asks Mozilo, glossing over the fact that Amazon is selling books, DVDs, clothes, lamps, and mini-tanks. If Amazon suddenly got into the business of writing billions of dollars in worthless subprime mortgages which are then sold off to investors who aren’t told that they are buying bundles of crap, then yes… condemnation would be in order.
Mozilo can’t legally be the CEO of a corporation, but like the rest of the folks that should be in jail right now, he is doing just fine, living in a house that is probably much bigger than yours and occasionally teaching finance to college student in Italy.
“I taught them the basics of finance based on my own experiences,” he explains in a rare instance of using a first-person pronoun.
Here’s another famous crook who loved the sound of his own name (possibly NSFW).
by Chris Morran via Consumerist
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