Articles Tagged with CMBS fraud

Standard & Poor’s has agreed to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges accusing the credit rating agency of fraudulent misconduct when rating certain commercial mortgage-backed securities. As part of the settlement, S & P will pay close to $80 million—$58 million to resolve the regulator’s case, plus $12 million to settle a parallel case by the New York Attorney General’s Office, and $7 million to resolve the Massachusetts Attorney General’s case.

The SEC put out three orders to institute resolved administrative proceedings against the credit rater. One order dealt with S & P’s practices involving conduit fusion SMBS ratings methodology. The Commission said that the credit rating agency’s public disclosures misrepresented that it was employing one approach when a different one was applied to rate several conduit fusion CMBS transactions, as well for putting out preliminary ratings on two transactions. To resolve these claims S & P will not rate conduit fusion CMBSs for a year.

The SEC’s second order said that after S & P was frozen out of the market for its conduit fusion ratings in 2011, the credit rating agency published a misleading and false article claiming to show that it’s overhauled credit ratings criteria enhancement levels could handle economic stress equal to “Great Depression-era levels.” The Commission said that S & P’s research was flawed, were made based on inappropriate assumptions, and the data used was decades off from the Depression’s serious losses. Without denying or admitting to the findings, S & P has consented to publicly retract the misleading and false data about the Depression era-related study and rectify inaccurate descriptions that were published about its criteria.