A watchdog agency said Wednesday that the legal tab for former leaders of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is at least $110 million.
And taxpayers have paid at least $47 million of it, according to an Office of Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency report.
And the total bill could be even higher since the inspector general report focused on only one particular legal case against Fannie Mae, and isn’t an exhaustive account of the housing giants’ legal bills, reportedly more than $160 million, according to a 2011 congressional hearing.
Changing Freddie Mac will not fix our housing problems
Yet, a whopping $99.4 million has been paid in legal bills to defend a 2004 case against three former Fannie Mae senior executives accused of inflating the firm’s publicly traded stock price to maximize their own bonuses. About $37 million of that has been picked up by the taxpayer.
For Freddie Mac, the overall legal tab paid by the taxpayers is $10 million, according to inspector general.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency inherited legal bills when it took Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under conservatorship in 2008. The
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