New York prosecutor Eric Schneiderman has initiated the investigation of the American credit organizations activity during the financial crisis. They are suspected in selling mortgage documents to investors. The Financial Times quotes the unnamed source of information as saying that within the framework of the investigation the prosecutor will have to examine the managers of at least three major banks of the country – Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
The American authorities have started several investigations during the recent years which should clear the role of US major banks in the mortgage credit crunch. It is supposed that the recession on the US mortgage market had led to the world’s financial crisis which then turned into the economic turmoil.
Thus, in the middle of 2010 US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) conducted the management audit of such banks as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in order to find out whether the banks had deceived the investors when carrying out the deals with mortgage documents ahead of the slump on the American real estate market.
Moreover, New-York attorney general of that time Andrew Cuomo initiated the inspection of banks’ activity in order to check if they had manipulated the rating agencies during the financial crisis. It was a question of four American and four European banks – Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Agricole SA, Credit Suisse Groupe Ag, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Merrill Lynch (Bank of America Corp.)
At the beginning of the year the United States Department of Justice accused Deutsche Bank and its American mortgage branch in scam activity on the US mortgage credit market. The authority filed the one billion dollars lawsuit against the bank to the New-York Federal Court.
