Wall Street Group Aggressively Lobbied a Federal Agency to Thwart Eminent Domain Plans

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/177965/wall-street-group-aggressively-lobbied-federal-agency-thwart-eminent-domain-plans

SIFMA also made sure to send its careful notes and observations to a key staffer at the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), General Counsel Alfred Pollard. The FHFA is the regulator who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which have been under federal government control since the 2008 financial crisis. In 2008, Congress also charged the FHFA with implementing “a plan to maximize assistance for homeowners.” But not only has FHFA failed to meaningfully help homeowners, in an August 2013 statement, the agency threatened to take legal action against localities that used eminent domain to restructure mortgages, and it raised the possibility that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be ordered to stop doing business altogether in areas that pursued eminent domain plans.

Through e-mails obtained by the ACCE’s FOIA request, we now know that SIFMA urged the FHFA to take precisely this course of action. In a March 25, 2013, e-mail to FHFA’s General Counsel Pollard, Richard Dorfman, then-head of SIFMA’s Securitization group, writes that “a federal solution would be the only way to quell this menacing concept.” Dorfman goes on to insist that the FHFA disallow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “to acquire, guarantee, securitize or otherwise transact in any loan” that could even hypothetically be subject to an eminent domain plan. And that is exactly what the FHFA did four months later.