Today, federal prosecutors and the SEC filed charges against Lee Bentley Farkas, the former chairman of private mortgage lending company Taylor, Bean & Whitaker. The DOJ announced that Farkas was arrested last night and charged in a 16-count indictment for his alleged role in a nearly $2 billion fraud scheme that contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank and TBW. Farkas also allegedly attempted to scam the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
Notably, both the criminal case and the related SEC action are filed in the Eastern District of Virginia despite the lack of any obvious connection between Farkas or TBW and Virginia. Why, then, Virginia? Full details are available in this post on my Enforcement Action blog over at Compliance Week.
