NPR reports:
The Justice Department has decided not to pursue a civil fraud case against Angelo Mozilo. Mozilo's lawyer David Seigel tells NPR that the Justice Department informed him that it has closed its investigation. "We are gratified by this decision," Seigel said.Thanks Eric Holder, Debra Lynch, and Barack Obama for looking the other way:
In the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a lot of fingers were pointing at Mozilo as someone to blame. That's because he was the CEO of Countrywide: the nation's largest mortgage lender, which collapsed after making massive numbers of bad home loans that resulted in foreclosures and helped send the U.S. banking system into cardiac arrest.
Mozilo also made several hundred million dollars selling his company's stock right before the bottom fell out and Countrywide imploded. That led to charges of insider trading by the SEC. So, with all that, fairly or not, Mozilo became a symbol of corporate greed and wrongdoing in the run-up to the mortgage debacle.
Still, in 2010 the SEC ordered Mozilo to pay $67.5 million in a civil fraud case. As is often the case with such SEC settlements, Mozilo neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.Imagine that. Here's the Friends of Angelo movement that Angelo had "paid off". That's a whole lot of money to settle in a civil case and not go for a criminal indictment.