Dan Gilbert, founder of the largest online mortgage lender in the U.S., has rejected allegations that his company cost the American government millions of dollars through faulty lending practices in recent years.
The Justice Department accuses Quicken Loans of costing the Department of Housing and Urban Development millions of dollars between 2007 and 2011 by issuing Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans to home buyers who had little chance of maintaining their mortgage payments, MLive.com said.
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Last week, Quicken Loans filed a lawsuit against the two departments, claiming that it’s being unfairly pressured into admitting guilt and agreeing to a costly settlement, and that the Justice Department “repeatedly threatened a high profile lawsuit” unless Quicken admits to using flawed lending practices in the issuance of the loans.
The Justice Department responded with a lawsuit which alleges Quicken’s underwriting moves led to employees disregarding FHA rules and falsely certifying compliance with underwriting requirements in order to reap the profits from FHA-insured mortgages, the report said.
Quicken Loans has said that the claims in the lawsuit aren’t true, and that the government pieced together fragments taken from 85, 000 subpoenaed documents that helped their case.
“This is what happens when you dare to stand up for justice and the truth to the Department of Justice…This was an attempt to embarrass us and continue to pressure us to write enormous size checks to settle (allegations) to make them go away, and to admit things that did not occur.” Gilbert said, according to The Free Press.
“They’re talking about an investigation that ran for three full years, 85, 000 documents subpoenaed…and this is what they come up with — a few anecdotes and a few fragments of chains of e-mails taken out of context, ” he added.
Gilbert, who has invested over $1 billion in Detroit, has a net worth of $4.8 billion, according to Forbes.
