JP Morgan’s lawyers are once again using intimidation tactics to scare whistleblowers in the Bear Stearns mortgage fraud machine lawsuits. Lawyers at Greenberg Traurig LP filed a public letter two days ago with Judge Crotty/Judge Ramos in New York State Supreme Court outing the name of a confidential whistleblower Ambac, Syncora & Assured Guarantee has secured to testify against the Bear Mortgage team run by Tom Marano, Jeff Verschleiser, and Mike Nierenberg. The JPM/Bear lawyers have also attempted to see copies of whistleblower affidavits before tomorrow’s big deposition in an apparent move to scare people coming forward saying they could be violating confidentiality agreements they signed when they left the third party due diligence firms Bear hired to help orchestra their alleged scheme.
Confidentiality agreements are often used when offering a severance to employees leaving financial firms so they can’t talk about anything bad they saw happen at the company. The worry for whistleblowers is those firms could sue to take back pay if the ex-employees do things like tell the public about financial crimes/violations their clients asked them to commit although we have yet to see a finance firm actually pull a dickhead move like this and file a real suit.
I previously reported this fall about 30 whistleblower from Bear’s wholly owned mortgage servicing firm, EMC, and outside due diligence firms, Watterson Prime and Clayton have now come forward in an amended complaint filed by Paterson Belknap Webb & Tyler for three of their monoline clients (mortgage bond insurers) suing JPM/BEAR for billions. These whistleblowers detail a ‘Bear Don’t Care’ attitude towards packaging billions of residential securities sold to pension funds and other institutional investors that blew up and lost buyers billions and billions of dollars. Court documents show this extra layer of independent due diligence for investors was nothing more than a sham to create a false sense of confidence in the Bear rmbs product.
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