Fannie Mae to Pay Huge Settlement Fine

We can think of one company with which you should not be aligned in order to secure any affordable Florida home loans.

Mortgage giant Fannie Mae is being fined between $300 million and $500 million for the alleged manipulation of accounting so that executives could collect millions in bonuses, according to a person familiar with the scandal and subsequent settlement.

The deal with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight and the Securities and Exchange Commission was being announced Tuesday as the government-sponsored company struggles to emerge from an $11 billion accounting scandal.

The housing oversight agency was issuing the results of its three-year investigation of Fannie Mae, an assessment that is widely expected to be sharply critical and to touch on areas not addressed in a previous report ordered by the company’s board of directors.

Those areas include the role of Fannie Mae’s board and some executives still at the company in the accounting debacle, according to two individuals familiar with the report, who spoke early this week on condition of anonymity because it had not yet been made public. The regulators are expected to recommend that the company review the executives’ actions with an eye to possibly firing or disciplining them, they said.

One of the individuals confirmed the anticipated civil fine against Washington-based Fannie Mae, the largest buyer and guarantor of home mortgages and Florida home mortgages in the country.