The former treasurer of what had been one of the largest US privately held mortgage lenders pleaded guilty Thursday to a nearly $2 billion fraud conspiracy that authorities say contributed to the failure of her employer as well as an Alabama-based bank.
Desiree Brown, 45, faces up to 30 years when she is sentenced in June. She was an executive at Ocala, Florida-based Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009. According to court documents, Brown admitted that she willingly participated in a yearslong scheme to sell more than $400 million in fictitious mortgages to Alabama-based Colonial Bank. Other mortgages sold to Colonial existed but had already been sold to other parties and were therefore worthless to Colonial.
Colonial collapsed in 2009, the sixth-biggest bank failure in US history. Taylor Bean and Colonial later used those fraudulent balance sheets to support an application by Colonial in October 2008 for $570 million in taxpayer funding under the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), according to the plea.
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