> “When confronted with loan after loan in which the paperwork was allegedly falsified, a grand jury voted to indict the bank and other individuals,” her statement said. “Eight individuals publicly accepted criminal responsibility for their roles in this conspiracy by admitting to crimes they committed while employed in Abacus Bank’s loan department.”
A different article has more details on the indictment: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-01-31/mortgage-fra....
> Abacus lied about applicants, Vance charged, because otherwise its loans wouldn’t have met Fannie Mae’s income requirements, and the bank depended on Fannie’s money for a significant chunk of its profit. The indictment stated that between 2005 and 2010, Abacus sold hundreds of millions of dollars of fraudulent mortgages to Fannie, reaping many millions of dollars in commissions and fees.
The other article also has descriptions about the "cooperation" missing from the NYT article:
> The Abacus clients whose aborted closing sparked Ken Yu’s termination lost their deposit on the property when the loan fell through. They went to the police and filed a complaint, mentioning that Yu had falsified their mortgage application. The police referred the matter to the DA. Abacus says it had already launched its own inquiry at this point, and that by mid-2010 it had hired two well-regarded fraud consultants, Vitale AML and the Mercadien Group, to do external investigations. The DA’s office declines to specify when its own investigation started, but says the bank only brought in the outside consultants after prosecutors started asking questions.
The NYT article also leaves out the gist of the reason the bank was indicted rather than just the individual employees:
> In April 2011, Yu pled guilty to grand larceny, fraud, and falsifying business records, and is cooperating with the investigation. Six others have also taken pleas. The DA’s argument is that fraud was standard operating procedure at Abacus, that it was taught there, not just tolerated. New employees with no banking knowledge and rudimentary English were instructed that mortgage origination was an act of financial sleight-of-hand: fake gift letters, fake verification of employment forms, blatant misrepresentations on loan application forms. The accused employees include Yiu Wah Wong, the bank’s chief credit officer, who reported directly to Jill Sung; and Wai Hung “Raymond” Tam, the loan origination supervisor, who trained the bank’s loan officers and processors. According to the indictment, the two managers “falsely told employees that the exceptionally low default rate of Abacus-originated loans made the underlying accuracy of loan documents insignificant.”