ALBANY, n.y. —New York’s attorney general Friday accused some of the nation’s largest banks of deceit and fraud in using an electronic mortgage registry that he said puts homeowners at a disadvantage in foreclosures while saving banks more than $2 billion.
Democrat Eric Schneiderman sued Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo over their use of the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems.
He claimed the banks submitted court documents containing false and misleading information that appeared to provide the authority for foreclosures when there was none.
Other business briefs
Boulder commissioners halt oil, gas drilling applications. Boulder County commissioners on Thursday imposed a temporary moratorium on accepting and processing new applications for oil and gas drilling
in unincorporated areas of the county.
The six-month moratorium, which took effect immediately and will remain in place until Aug. 2, is intended to give county staff time to study the adequacy of Boulder County’s current land-use regulations and to propose possible amendments.
Ex-CFO testifies about “slush fund” at fraud trial. R. Allen Stanford funneled millions of dollars siphoned from investor deposits through a “slush fund” at Societe Generale SA in Switzerland to cover bribes, personal expenses and private investments, his former finance chief told jurors at the ex-financier’s criminal fraud trial.
“It was a slush fund, just used for whatever the holder wanted to use it for,” James M. Davis, Stanford Financial Group’s former chief financial officer, testified Friday about the SocGen account.
ConocoPhillips seeks extension for campus plans. ConocoPhillips intends to request another extension to file the final development plans for its proposed Louisville campus, according to City Manager Malcolm Fleming, the Daily Camera reported.
In his bimonthly economic update in advance of Tuesday’s council meeting, Fleming indicated that such a move confirmed that ConocoPhillips’ plans for its Boulder County site remained inactive because of the expected split of the Houston-based energy firm into two publicly traded companies.
Micro-chip industry icon dies in plane crash. Steve Appleton, who took charge of Micron Technology at 34 and went on to become the memory-chip industry’s longest-serving chief executive, died after crashing an experimental plane in Boise, Idaho. He was 51.
Appleton was flying a private aircraft with a fixed wing and single engine when it crashed between two runways, said a spokeswoman for the Boise airport.
Coal-mining firm to reduce production. Alpha Natural Resources, the U.S. coal miner that bought Massey Energy for $7.1 billion in June, said it will reduce production as more utilities switch to natural gas to generate electricity.
Alpha expects to reduce output by about 2.5 million tons a year of thermal coal and 1.5 million tons of metallurgical coal, the Bristol, Va.-based company said in a statement. Power companies burn thermal coal, while metallurgical coal is a key raw material used in steelmaking.
Administration releases documents on Solyndra. The Obama administration released more than 300 pages of documents to House Republicans investigating the $535 million U.S. loan guarantee to Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar-panel maker.
The documents, including communications before the announcement of a “conditional commitment” of the loan guarantee in March 2009, had been sought by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigations panel. None of the documents released Friday show White House involvement in the decision by the Energy Department to award the guarantee, Kathryn Ruemmler, counsel to President Barack Obama, wrote to Reps. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the committee, and Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican who leads the investigations panel.
Denver Post staff and wire reports
