Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, ran OneWest Bank from 2009 to 2015.
Now, in coverage published by The Intercept, a memo [published here] from 2013 urged top officials in then-Attorney General Kamala Harris’s office to sue OneWest Bank over allegations of foreclosure violations, which included backdating mortgage documents to speed up foreclosures and manipulating the results of home auctions, according to coverage in Bloomberg.
The memo, “alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.”
Mnuchin, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, former chairman of OneWest Bank, and President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Department of the Treasury, is meanwhile resigning from the board of CIT Group, which bought OneWest in 2015, in order to pursue the position without conflict.
The coverage in The Intercept may complicate that process:
"The consistent violations of California foreclosure processes outlined in the memo would indicate that Mnuchin’s bank didn’t merely act callously, but did so with blatant disregard for the law.
According to the memo, OneWest also obstructed the investigation by ordering third parties to refuse to comply with state subpoenas."
Ultimately, no action was taken by the AG against OneWest.
