blowing whistle citi - politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... ·...

10
Blowing the Whistle on Citi SHERRY HUNT EXPOSED WRONGDOING AT THE BANK AND WON $31 MILLION FOR HERSELF. Blowing the Whistle on Citi SHERRY HUNT EXPOSED WRONGDOING AT THE BANK AND WON $31 MILLION FOR HERSELF. THE GOLDMAN GUY RUNNING LONDON’S OLYMPICS JULY 2012 CEOS: HIGH PAY, LOW RETURNS REINVENTING THE REALLY SMALL CAR Bloomberg Markets

Upload: phungminh

Post on 26-Mar-2018

215 views

Category:

Documents


1 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

Blowing the

Whistle on Citi

Sherry hunt exposed wrongdoing at the

bank and won $31 m

illion for herself.

Blowing the

Whistle on Citi

Sherry hunt exposed wrongdoing at the

bank and won $31 m

illion for herself.

the goldman guy running

london’s olympicsJ U lY 2 0 1 2

ceos: high pay, low returns

reinventing the really small car

bl

oo

mb

er

gm

ar

ke

ts

.co

mB

loo

mb

erg M

arketsB

LO

WIN

G T

HE

WH

IST

LE

ON

CIT

I JU

lY 2

012

07_COVER [PT].indd 3 5/25/12 10:49 AM

Page 2: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

By BoB Ivry

Citi

Whistle

photographs by wesley mann

TheCOVER STORY

Blowing

On

Sherry hunt, a country muSIc–lovIng manager at the Bank’S maSSIve mortgage unIt, expoSed eIght yearS of mISdeedS—rIght up Into 2012—and won $31 mIllIon for herSelf.

Page 3: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

J u l y 2 0 1 1 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS 2 7

Page 4: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

pr

evio

us

sp

rea

d: g

ro

om

ing

by

em

ily

mil

ler

; bo

wen

: br

ent

hu

mp

hr

eys

2 8 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS J u l y 2 0 1 2

Michigan by a dad who taught her to fish and a mom who showed her how to find wild mushrooms. She listened to Marty Robbins and Buck Owens on the radio and came to believe that God has a bigger plan, that everything happens for a reason. She got married at 16 and didn’t go to college. After she had her

first child at 17, she needed a job. A friend helped her find one in 1975, pro-cessing home loans at a small bank in Alaska.

Over the next 30 years, Hunt moved up the ladder to mortgage-banking po-sitions in Indiana, Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days off, when she wasn’t fishing with her husband, Jonathan, she rode her horse, Cody, in Wild West shows. She sometimes dressed up as the legendary cowgirl Annie Oakley, firing blanks from a vintage rifle to en-tertain an audience. She liked the mort-gage business, liked that she was helping people buy houses.

In November 2004, Hunt, now 55, joined Citigroup Inc. as a vice president in the mortgage unit. It looked like a great career move. The housing market was booming, and the New York–based bank, the sixth-largest lender in the U.S. at the time, was responsible for 3.5 percent of all home loans. Hunt su-pervised 65 mortgage underwriters at CitiMortgage Inc.’s sprawling head-quarters in O’Fallon, Missouri, 45 min-utes west of St. Louis.

Hunt’s team was responsible for pro-tecting Citigroup from fraud and bad investments. She and her colleagues in-spected loans Citi wanted to buy from outside brokers and lenders to see whether they met the bank’s standards. The mortgages had to have properly signed paperwork, verifiable borrower income and realistic appraisals. Citi would vouch for the quality of these loans when it sold them to investors or approved them for government mort-gage insurance.

Investor demand was so strong for mortgages packaged into securities that Citigroup couldn’t process them fast enough. The Citi stamp of approval told investors that the bank would stand behind the mortgages if borrow-ers quit paying.

At the mortgage-processing fac-tory in O’Fallon, Hunt was working on an assembly line that helped inflate a housing bubble whose implosion would shake the world. The O’Fallon

Sherry Hunt never expected to be a senior manager at a Wall Street bank. She was a country girl, raised in rural

richard bowen, formerly hunt’s boss, was demoted after alerting Citi executives about the extent of tainted home loans.

BlowIng the whIStle on cItI

Page 5: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

illu

str

atio

n b

y a

nd

rea

ma

nza

ti

mortgage machinery was moving too fast to check every loan, Hunt says. By 2006, the bank was buying mortgages from outside lenders with doctored tax forms, phony appraisals and missing signatures, she says. It was Hunt’s job to identify these defects, and she did, in regular reports to her bosses.

Executives buried her findings, Hunt says, before, during and after the finan-cial crisis, and even into 2012. In March

2011, more than two years after Citi-group took $45 billion in bailouts from the U.S. government and billions more from the Federal Reserve—more in total than any other U.S. bank—Jeffery Polkinghorne, an O’Fallon executive in charge of loan quality, asked Hunt and a colleague to stay in a conference room after a meeting.

The encounter with Polkinghorne was brief and tense, Hunt says. The

number of loans classified as defective would have to fall, he told them, or it would be “your asses on the line.”

Hunt says it was clear what Polking-horne was asking—and she wanted no part of it. “All a dishonest person had to do was change the reports to make things look better than they were,” Hunt says. “I wouldn’t play along.”

Instead, she took her employer to court—and won. In August 2011, five

Sources: U.S. Justice Department, Citigroup, Sherry Hunt and Bloomberg

1 b u y i n g l o a n s 2 a p p r o v i n g l o a n s

4b

4a i n v E s T i g aT i n g F r a u D

r e b u t t i n g f i n d i n g s

3 c h E c k i n g l o a n s

5 s E l l i n g l o a n s

C i t i ’ s f l a w e d M o r t g a g e M a C h i n eC i t i M o r t g a g e , w h i C h e M p l o y s 9 , 2 0 0 p e o p l e t o p r o C e s s h o M e l o a n s , p a i d $ 1 5 8 . 3 M i l l i o n i n a s e t t l e M e n t, a d M i t t i n g i t h a d C e r t i f i e d t h o u s a n d s o f M o r t-g a g e s t h at d i d n ’ t M e e t g o v e r n M e n t s ta n d a r d s .

Citi’s fraud prevention and investigation group is required to report bad loans to Fannie mae, Freddie mac and the Fha, which insures home loans. It didn’t.

Citi created a team in 2009 to dispute quality-control findings. that lowered the defect rate by changing numbers in reports. It didn’t make the loans any better.

Different teams sell mortgages approved by Citi and insured by the Fha.

Citi has different groups that identify mortgages Citi might buy from brokers and outside lenders. the bank also originates its own mortgages.

so-called underwriters—such as sherry hunt and richard bowen—examine mortgages the bank might buy to make sure they’re sound. many loans didn’t

meet bank standards. Citi bought them anyway.

Citimortgage’s quality-control team, which hunt joined in 2008, reviews a sample of loans after the bank buys them. any with signs of possible fraud are sent to investigators.

J u l y 2 0 1 1 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS 2 9

Page 6: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

3 0 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS J u l y 2 0 1 2

months after the meeting with Polking-horne, Hunt sued Citigroup in Manhat-tan federal court, accusing its home-loan division of systematically violating U.S. mortgage regulations. The U.S. Justice Department decided to join her suit in January. Citigroup didn’t dispute any of Hunt’s facts; it didn’t mount a defense in public or in court. On Feb. 15, 2012, the bank agreed to pay $158.3 million to the U.S. govern-ment to settle the case. Citigroup ad-mitted approving loans for government insurance that didn’t qualify under Federal Housing Administration rules. Prosecutors kept open the possibility of bringing criminal charges, without specifying targets.

Citigroup behaving badly as late as 2012 shows how a big bank hasn’t yet absorbed the lessons of the credit crisis despite billions of dollars in bailouts, says Neil Barofsky, former special in-spector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. “This case demon-strates that the notion that the bailed-out banks have somehow found God and have reformed their ways in the af-termath of the financial crisis is pure myth,” he says.

As a reward for blowing the whistle on her employer, Hunt, the country girl turned banker, got $31 million out of

the settlement paid by Citigroup.Hunt still remembers her first im-

pressions of CitiMortgage’s O’Fallon headquarters, a complex of three con-crete-and-glass buildings surrounded by manicured lawns and vast parking lots. Inside are endless rows of cubicles where 3,800 employees trade e-mails and conduct conference calls. Hunt says at first she felt like a mouse in a maze. “You only see people’s faces when someone brings in doughnuts and the smell gets them peeking over

the tops of their cubicles,” she says.Over time, she came to appreciate

the camaraderie. Every month, work-ers conducted the so-called Jean Char-ities. Employees contributed $20 for the privilege of wearing jeans every day, with the money going to local nonprofit organizations. With so many workers,

it added up to $25,000 a month. “Citi is full of wonderful people, conscientious people,” Hunt says.

Those people worked on different teams to process mortgages, all of them focused on keeping home loans moving through the system. One team bought loans from brokers and other lenders. Another team, called underwriters, made sure loan paperwork was com-plete and the mortgages met the bank’s and the government’s guidelines. Yet another group did spot-checks on loans

already purchased. It was such a high-volume business that one group’s as-signment was simply to keep loans moving on the assembly line. Still an-other unit sold loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the government-controlled companies that bundled them into securities for sale to investors. Those were the types of securities that blew up in 2007, ignit-ing a global financial crisis.

Workers had a powerful incentive to push mortgages through the process even if flaws were found: compensa-tion. The pay of CitiMortgage employ-ees all the way up to the division’s chief executive officer depended on a high percentage of approved loans, the gov-ernment’s complaint says.

By 2006, Hunt’s team was pro-cessing $50 billion in loans that Citi-Mortgage bought from hundreds of mortgage companies. Because her unit couldn’t possibly review them all, they checked a sample. When a mortgage wasn’t up to federal stan-dards—which could be any error rang-ing from an unsigned document to a false income statement or a hyped-up appraisal—her team labeled the loan as defective. In late 2007, Hunt’s

Citimortgage headquarters in o’Fallon, missouri, is where hunt worked with 3,800 bank employees.

‘All a dishonest person had to do was change the reports to make things look better,’ Sherry Hunt says. ‘I wouldn’t play along.’

BlowIng the whIStle on cItI

Page 7: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

cItIgroup’S Share prIceS have dropped By 92 percent SInce vIkram pandIt waS named ceo.

cItIgroup’S SlIdeassets: $1.94 trillion rank aMong u.s. banks: 3 total nuMber of eMployees worldwide: 263,000

pandit’s pay paCkage for 2011*

$14.9 million

BaIlout detaIlS

$45 billion + $301 billion in asset guarantees

tarpciTi Took morE monEy From ThE govErnmEnT Than any oThEr u.s. bank. iT has paiD back all oF iT, wiTh inTErEsT.

* Citigroup shareholders on April 16 voted down Pandit’s compensation package by a vote of about 55 to 45 percent. The final decision rests with the board of directors, which says it will consider the shareholders’ opinions.

2009 20112008 2010 2012

Sources: Citigroup, U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. Justice Department, Mortgage Bankers Association, Bloomberg

group estimated that about 60 per-cent of the mortgages Citigroup was buying and selling were missing some form of documentation. Hunt says she took her concerns to her boss, Richard Bowen III.

Bowen, 64, is a religious man, a for-mer Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps cadet at Texas Tech University in Lubbock with an attention to de-tail that befits his background as a cer-tified public accountant. When he saw the magnitude of the mortgage de-fects, Bowen says he prayed for guid-ance. In a Nov. 3, 2007, e-mail, he alerted Citigroup executives, includ-ing Robert Rubin, then chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and a former Treasury secretary; Chief Finan-cial Officer Gary Crittenden; the bank’s senior risk officer; and its chief auditor. Bowen put the words “URGENT—READ

IMMEDIATELY—FINANCIAL IS -SUES” in the subject line.

“The reason for this urgent e-mail concerns breakdowns of internal con-trols and resulting significant but pos-sibly unrecognized financial losses existing within our organization,” Bowen wrote. “We continue to be sig-nificantly out of compliance.”

There were no noticeable changes in the mortgage machinery as a result of Bowen’s warning, Hunt says.

Just a week after Bowen sent his e-mail, Sherry and Jonathan were driv-ing their Toyota Camry about 55 miles (89 kilometers) per hour on four-lane Providence Road in Columbia, Mis-souri, when a driver in a Honda Civic hit them head-on. Sherry broke a foot and her sternum. Jonathan broke an arm and his sternum. Doctors used four bones harvested from a cadaver

and titanium screws to stabilize his neck. “You come out of an experience like that with a commitment to mak-ing the most of the time you have and making the world a better place,” Sherry says.

Three months after the accident, at-torneys from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, a New York law firm representing Citigroup, inter-viewed Hunt. She had no idea at the time that it was related to Bowen’s complaint, she says. The lawyers’ ques-tions made her search her memory for details of loans and conversations with colleagues, she says. She decided to take notes from that time forward on a spreadsheet she kept on her home computer.

Bowen’s e-mail is now part of the ar-chive of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel created by Con-gress in 2009. Citigroup’s response to the commission, FCIC records show, came from Brad Karp, chairman of Paul Weiss. He said Citigroup had reviewed Bowen’s issues, fired a supervisor and changed its underwriting system, with-out providing specifics.

One change resulting from Bowen’s e-mail affected Bowen himself. He went from managing 220 people to overseeing two, according to the FCIC report. By January 2009, Bowen no longer worked for Citigroup, he told the FCIC.

“More people haven’t come forward because they saw what happened to me,” says Bowen, who’s now an ac-counting and finance professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He says Hunt is the exception. “Sherry is an ab-solutely fantastic lady who knows what she’s doing. She has a conscience. I have the highest regard for her.”

Bowen declined to comment on the circumstances of his departure from Citigroup. The bank denies any retalia-tion against him.

After Bowen left, Hunt had only one person she could confide in: her hus-band. She and Jonathan, 51, met in 1998 at a Minnesota casino. He trained

J u l y 2 0 1 1 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS 3 1

−92%

$ 3 3 2 . 3 0vikram pandit named ceo (12/11/07)

$ 13 4 .70first tarp loan (10/28/08)

$ 2 8 . 0 0peak overnight borrowing from federal reserve (1/20/09)

$ 42 . 9 21-for-10 reverse stock split (5/11/11)

$ 2 6 . 0 1 (05/18/12)

Page 8: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

jen

niF

er s

. alt

ma

n/g

etty

3 2 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS J u l y 2 0 1 2

Citimortgage Ceo sanjiv das, in his manhattan office, says he’s proud of his division’s terrific work.

search-and-rescue dogs for a living. They share a love of animals, especially horses. She says she was attracted to his sense of humor. He would quote coun-try songs to make her laugh. They were married in 1999.

When Sherry worked for U.S. Ban-corp in Missouri, she and Jonathan bred and raised horses. As members of the Old West Society of Minnesota, the couple performed in re-enactments of 19th-century events, such as the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Sometimes she dressed up as a society woman, wearing a bustle. When she played Annie Oak-ley, she wore a buckskin outfit with a bullwhip coiled around her shoulder. She galloped into the arena on her horse—but never too fast, her husband says. “Sherry and speed on a horse don’t get along,” he says with a grin.

Every workday for eight years before winning her lawsuit, Sherry Hunt left their house on its 10-acre (4-hectare) lot and drove along a dirt road where cows and horses grazed in pastures. She turned onto a two-lane county highway that passed over a river bridge barely wide enough for two cars. About 45 minutes later, she’d arrive at the office.

After Bowen went public with her

findings, Hunt says she was transferred to the quality-control group on April 1, 2008. She went from supervising 65 people to managing none. “What I saw there was 10 times worse,” she says. “Every time I turned over a rock, I found a snake.”

One place where she uncovered flaws was in the fraud prevention and investigation group. That’s where Hunt’s team shipped questionable loans, with issues such as obviously forged signatures, whited-out income lines on tax forms or misspelled bank

names on borrower bank statements. The group was supposed to investigate the mortgages for fraud and notify the FHA within a month when it found it. In November 2009, Hunt says, she

came across a list of about 1,000 loans that the quality-control team had iden-tified for possible fraud. The fraud pre-vention and investigation group had left some of the mortgages in the queue for more than two years without check-ing them, Hunt says. Not one notifica-tion went to the FHA before July 2011, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Man-hattan issued a subpoena to the O’Fallon office, the government’s com-plaint says.

In 2009, different teams began feud-ing, internal e-mails made public in the

Justice Department case show. That’s when CitiMortgage created yet another team whose mission was to challenge the findings of Hunt’s quality-control group and persuade her and her col-leagues to change their decisions on the suitability of loans.

In November 2010, Ross Leckie, a se-nior director of CitiMortgage’s retail bank mortgage unit, sent an e-mail or-dering his staff to meet its goal of a maximum 5 percent defect rate on home loans. Quality-control employees had identified 10 loans with severe flaws from a pool of 138, Leckie said, for a rate of 7.25 percent. “Drive this rate down by brute force,” he wrote. “We need three loans to be removed to get to 5.07 percent.”

CitiMortgage defect rates did plum-met, according to notes Hunt kept. It wasn’t because there were fewer bad mortgages, she says. “It’s because they were beating us up over the quality-control reports,” she says.

In late 2010, Hunt began studying the new federal whistle-blower rules that Congress had just enacted in July as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

‘This urgent e-mail concerns breakdowns of internal controls,’ CitiMortgage executive Richard Bowen wrote in November 2007. ‘We continue to be significantly out of compliance.’

BlowIng the whIStle on cItI

Page 9: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

Fred

r C

on

ra

d/t

he

new

yo

rk

tim

es/

red

ux

3 4 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS J u l y 2 0 1 2

The stress had been mounting for Sherry and Jon. Conflicts at the office, the physical pain that lingered from the car wreck and growing anxiety over Citi’s bad mortgages were taking a toll. The Hunts say the laughter they often shared had faded.

Sherry says she drew inspiration from a country song by Rascal Flatts called “Stand.” “Decide you’ve had enough,” it goes. “You get mad. You get strong. Wipe your hands, shake it off, then you stand.”

Hunt says she pinned the lyrics to her cubicle wall. “It made me stronger,” she says.

Hunt needed the strength on March 22, 2011. That’s the day Polkinghorne, who was three levels above her in the chain of command, called her and a col-league aside and told them their asses were on the line if the defect rates didn’t fall. Polkinghorne couldn’t be reached for comment, and Citigroup declined to make him available for an interview. That night, she and Jon agreed the time had come for her to take a stand. So Hunt decided to follow the first step prescribed by Dodd-Frank: formally complaining to the company. The prospect kept her awake

at night. “I was ready to give up my career and my life savings to get this done,” she says.

On March 29, 2011, Hunt walked into CitiMortgage’s human resources de-partment in O’Fallon and told them everything: how the bank had been rou-tinely buying and selling bad mortgages for years, how the fraud unit wasn’t do-ing its job and how the quality-control people were being pressured to change their ratings.

Whistle-blower rules mandate that Hunt had to notify the Securi-ties and Exchange Commission, the

government regulator that oversees Citigroup’s mortgage business, within 90 days of reporting her concerns in-ternally. “I am afraid of what I know,” she wrote the SEC on May 24, 2011. “I do not want to know what I know. I have nothing to gain from coming for-ward and have no hidden agenda.”

Hunt hired a lawyer, Finley Gibbs of

Rotts & Gibbs LLC in Columbia, Mis-souri. He had represented the Hunts after their car accident. Starting on June 27, 2011, Hunt and Gibbs shared details from her spreadsheet in four conference calls with Justice Depart-ment investigators. The officials made no promises about whether they would take action against Citigroup.

For two months, Sherry and Jon sweated over what could happen if she sued Citigroup without help from the government. They concluded she had to do it, Hunt says. On Aug. 5, 2011, Hunt filed a false-claims complaint in

U.S. District Court in Manhattan.“I still had to go into work,” Hunt

says. Because the complaint was sealed, no one in her office knew about it. She pinned a postcard of Leonardo da Vin-ci’s Mona Lisa next to the Rascal Flatts lyrics. Like Mona Lisa, Sherry Hunt had a secret.

She knew her chances of winning were slim because she couldn’t match the resources of a big bank. Just 20 per-cent of whistle-blowers get help from government prosecutors, and without that, success is rare, according to the National Whistleblowers Center in Washington.

After filing the lawsuit, Hunt says, she felt like a ghost navigating the cubi-cles of CitiMortgage. Nobody knew, she says, yet she felt vulnerable, as if she could lose her job at any moment.

Sherry and Jon were elated on Jan. 3, 2012, when she got a call from her lawyer: U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan had decided to join her on behalf of the Justice Department in the case.

There was no testimony and no trial. Citigroup admitted wrongdoing on Feb. 15 and paid the $158.3 million to settle. In a press release the same day, Citi said it was pleased to resolve the matter. “We take our quality-assurance processes seriously and have proac-tively undertaken process improve-ments to ensure that they are as robust as possible,” the bank wrote. The state-ment didn’t mention Hunt.

Citigroup isn’t the only bank that’s been held accountable for processing bad mortgages. In February, Char-lotte, North Carolina–based Bank of America Corp. settled a false-claims case with the government for $1 bil-lion, without admitting wrongdoing. In May, Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG agreed to pay $202.3 million for endorsing unqualified mortgages for FHA insurance, and admitted wrongdoing. What continues to set Citigroup apart is that the bank ap-proved flawed loans well past the 2008 financial crisis. A battleground over

u.s. attorney preet bharara in manhattan joined hunt’s lawsuit and won an admission from Citi.

BlowIng the whIStle on cItI

Citi created a team to rebut Hunt’s group’s findings of flawed loans. ‘They were beating us up over the quality-control reports,’ she says.

Page 10: Blowing Whistle Citi - Politicoimages.politico.com/global/2012/05/bloomberg_markets_magazine... · BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON CITI JU l Y 2012 07 ... Minnesota and Mis-souri. On her days

3 6 B lo o m B e r g m a r k e tS J u l y 2 0 1 2

Parsons says. “Getting our arms around the problem and getting it fixed has been a top priority.”

Hunt says she hopes her victory in-spires others to take a stand. “I want people to know they can come for-ward,” she says. “If I can do it, they can do it. We need to change what’s wrong in our own backyards, and that’s how we end up changing the big things.”

After they received their share of the settlement, the Hunts decided to do-nate their house in Missouri to the Troy First Baptist Church and move to a warmer climate. Sitting at the kitchen counter, Jon calls Sherry over to watch a video on his tablet. It’s the Zac Brown Band doing a song called “Knee Deep,” which is about the dream of a perma-nent vacation.

“Listen,” Jon tells his wife, pointing to the video. Then he sings along: “Only worry in the world is the tide gonna reach my chair.”

Sherry Hunt tips her head back and hoots.BoB Ivry Is a projeCts anD InvestIgatIons reporter at bloomberg news In new york. [email protected]

to write a letter to the editor, send an e-mail to [email protected] or type mag <go>.

in compensation for 2011. The pay was tied to Pandit’s push for ethical conduct, the bank said in a March 8 regulatory filing. The filing specifi-cally cited Pandit’s success in improv-ing Citigroup’s U.S. mortgage unit. On April 16, in an unprecedented move, Citi shareholders voted to reject Pan-dit’s compensation by about 55 to 45 percent. The vote was nonbinding, and the bank’s board of directors has final say on pay.

“We gave this guy a pretty substan-tial incentive award, and there’s a basis for it,” says Richard Parsons, who was Citigroup’s chairman and a member of its compensation committee until he retired in April. “Our view was, under Vikram’s leadership, we did a pretty good job of moving Citigroup forward in the year 2011, but there was still progress to be made.”

The amount Citigroup paid in the settlement amounts to 1.4 percent of its 2011 net income of $11.2 billion.

“It’s about more than dollars; it’s about the reputational risk of the en-terprise and how we do business,”

loan quality persisted at CitiMortgage even as the settlement was signed in February, the complaint says.

Just months after Citigroup settled with the Justice Department, another big financial institution, JPMorgan Chase & Co., announced a multibillion-dollar trading loss—helping to rekindle the debate over regulation of so-called too-big-to-fail banks. President Barack Obama invoked the JPMorgan loss as more evidence of the need for tighter regulation of Wall Street. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presiden-tial nominee, has meanwhile continued to call for the repeal of Dodd-Frank, the law Sherry Hunt followed when she blew the whistle on her employer.

If Citigroup has learned anything from Sherry Hunt, it’s not clear from the comments of CitiMortgage CEO Sanjiv Das, who’s based in New York. He says his division does terrific work. “We are focused on making sure we manufacture loans the right way,” he says. “This is a complex industry. It’s a complex process. It takes time. We’re heading down a trajectory that I’m in-credibly proud of. Is there something that is systemically wrong? Absolutely not. Absolutely not.”

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit de-clined to comment for this story. In a video recorded in 2010 and posted by Citi on the Internet, Pandit pledged that his bank was turning over a new leaf. “We’re going to stand for the financial services company that practices respon-sible finance—making sure we’re trans-parent, making sure we’re honest, making sure we manage our sharehold-ers’ money prudently,” he says.

Citigroup repaid with interest the $45 billion in government bailout loans it took in 2008 and reported profits during each of the nine quarters ended in March 2012. Yet shareholders re-main restive. Citi’s stock fell 92 percent from Dec. 11, 2007, when Pandit be-came CEO, to May 18.

Three weeks after Citigroup settled the Hunt case, the bank’s board of di-rectors awarded Pandit $14.9 million

hunt and her husband, jonathan, in a neighbor’s yard, say they agonized over the decision to sue Citi.

BlowIng the whIStle on cItI