Conform to Stated Underwriting Guidelines
155. Emails and testimony from the Levin-Coburn Report further confirm that Deutsche Bank knew that the representations in the Registration Statements were false. For instance, Deutsche Bank employee Greg Lippmann stated, in an email dated September 21, 2006, that “ace is generally horrible.” See Levin-Coburn Report at 339. This assessment was of course correct—as reflected above in Table 1, ACE was the depositor for 34 of the 40
Securitizations, and the Registration Statements for all of those Securitizations misstated key loan data, including owner occupancy percentages and LTV ratios. In other emails, Mr. Lippmann was more explicit, calling Deutsche Bank’s residential mortgage-backed
securitizations “crap” and “pigs” and predicting, correctly (though without advising the GSEs or other investors), that they would lose value. Id. at 10 (Lippman emails of September 1, 2006, and August 4, 2006, respectively).
156. Even more troubling, at the same time that Deutsche Bank was marketing its residential mortgage-backed securitizations to investors, it “allowed Mr. Lippmann to develop a large proprietary short position for the bank in the RMBS market,” which ultimately resulted in “a profit of $1.5 billion, which Mr. Lippmann claims is more money on a single position than any other trade had ever made for Deutsche Bank in its history.” Id. Mr. Lippmann’s emails and the huge profit that Deutsch Bank reaped by betting against mortgage-backed securities through
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its short position confirm that Deutsche Bank was aware that the mortgage loans underlying the Securitizations were much riskier than indicated by the representations in the Registration Statements.
157. Other former Deutsche Bank employees have described the manner in which Deutsche Bank used the false information in the Registration Statements to obtain AAA credit ratings essential for marketing Certificates to investors such as the GSEs. Just as the GSEs relied on Defendants to provide accurate information concerning the credit quality of the mortgage pools, the rating agencies relied on Defendants to provide them with accurate information on which to base their ratings. As Susan Barnes, the North American Practice Leader for RMBS at S&P from 2005 to 2008, explained:
The securitization process relies on the quality of the data generated about the loans going into the securitizations. S&P
relies on the data produced by others and reported to both S&P and investors about those loans. At the time that it begins its
analysis of a securitization, S&P received detailed data concerning the loan characteristics of each of the loans in the pool—up to 70 separate characteristics for each loan in a pool of, potentially, thousands of loans. S&P does not receive the original loan files
for the loans in the pool. Those files are reviewed by the arranger
or sponsor of the transaction, who is also responsible for reporting accurate information about the loans in the deal documents and offering documents to potential investors.
Transcript of Testimony of Susan Barnes before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, April 23, 2010, at 9 (emphasis added).
158. Defendants fed the rating agencies the same false loan level data regarding loan- to-value ratios, owner-occupancy status, home values, and debt-to-income ratios that they provided to investors in aggregate form in the Prospectuses and Prospectus Supplements. The rating agencies then input this false data into their quantitative models to assess the credit risk associated with the RMBS, project likely future defaults, and ultimately, determine the ratings on
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Defendants’ RMBS products. As a result, Defendants essentially pre-determined the ratings by feeding bad data into the ratings system.
159. In addition to feeding the rating agencies bad loan data, Deutsche Bank pressured rating agencies into assigning ratings that Deutsche Bank knew were inflated. For example, in a March 2007 email, obtained by Senate investigators, a Moody’s analyst complained to a
colleague that after Moody’s suggested certain downward rating adjustments for a particular RMBS, a Deutsche Bank investment banker “push[ed] back dearly saying that the deal has been marketed already and that we [Moody’s] came back ‘too late’ with this discovery.” According to the analyst, the investment banker further argued that it was “hard” for Deutsche Bank to
“change the structure at this point,” effectively conceding that the rating assigned to the RMBS would not reflect the actual likelihood of default. Levin-Coburn Report at 280, fn. 1082.
160. In another instance, a Deutsche Bank banker expressly encouraged an analyst at Moody’s to focus on short term profits at the expense of rating accuracy. The Former Senior Vice President and Senior Credit Officer at Moody’s, Richard Michalek, testified to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that a Deutsche Bank investment banker once told Michalek: ‘‘I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone. So why are you making life difficult right now over this particular comment?’’ According to Michalek, the comment exemplified “short-term thinking” on the part the investment banks: “Short term, get this deal done, get this quarter closed, get this bonus booked, because I do not know whether or not my group is going to be here at the end of next quarter, so I have to think of this next bonus.” Transcript of Testimony of Richard
Michalek before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, April 23, 2010, Vol. 3 at 44.
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