Prosecutors Bring Largest Ever Tarp Fraud Case

Ashby Jones, our esteemed and vacationing law blogger, once wrote: “Trying to rip off the TARP program is like, well, going for the collective front pocket of the nation in an attempt to pull out some change.”

Yesterday, authorities indicted Lee Farkas, the former chairman of a failed Florida mortgage lender, on charges that he engineered a multibillion-dollar fraud.

Farkas’s former company, Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp., which once was one of the nation’s largest home lenders, allegedly lied about the health of loans it was servicing for the Federal Housing Administration, according to prosecutors.

Farkas also is alleged to have wrongly attempted to obtain more than $550 million from the government’s bank-bailout fund, which makes this the largest TARP fraud case to date.