Photo By: Wall Street Geek
By Marcy Gordon and Greg Risling
Angelo Mozilo, the man who rode the housing boom to build Countrywide Financial Corp. into a California colossus of high-risk mortgage lending, has been charged with civil fraud and illegal insider trading by federal regulators who accuse him of deceiving shareholders and profiting on confidential information.
Mozilo, 70, is the most high-profile individual to face formal charges from the federal government in the aftermath of the crisis. He has denied any wrongdoing and his attorney on Thursday called the SEC’s allegations “baseless.”
The SEC’s civil lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles, named Mozilo, Countrywide’s former chief operating officer David Sambol, 49, and ex-chief financial officer Eric Sieracki, 52.
The SEC is seeking injunctions and unspecified civil fines against Mozilo, Sambol and Sieracki and wants them to be barred from serving as officers or directors of any public company. The agency also is seeking unspecified restitution of allegedly ill-gotten profits from Mozilo and Sambol.
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