farewell ugoletti, you dude #fanniegate
Embattled official at center of Fannie Mae litigation retires
October 12, 2015 | 10:58pm
Fannie Mae headquarters in Washington.Photo: AP
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The Washington official at the center of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholder litigation has left the building.
Mario Ugoletti, a senior official at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, retired in September, an agency spokesman told The Post.
Ugoletti became publicly enmeshed in the controversy over the future of Fannie and Freddie after lawyers for Fairholme Funds, a shareholder, alleged in August that Ugoletti misled a federal court in 2013 when he swore the government did not know the two mortgage giants were about to return to profitability.
Then the No. 2 official at FHFA, Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, Ugoletti, a career civil servant, was intimately involved in the agency’s decision in 2012 to sweep all of companies’ future profits to
Treasury. The mortgage giants were supposed to pay back a $187 billion taxpayer bailout through a dividend, but FHFA argued that profits produced by the two companies would be so small that all their profits needed to be swept to Treasury.
But soon after the sweep was enacted, both companies returned to profitability.
Since then, they’ve sent more than $230 billion in profits to Treasury. fanni Bruce Berkowitz’s Fairholme, which owns more than $1 billion in Fannie and Freddie preferred shares, sued the government over the sweep decision.
Ugoletti’s FHFA exit came shortly after an Aug. 19 Fairholme court filing alleged that he had made “at a minimum, misleading” statements to a federal court that aren’t “credible.”
It is unknown whether his departure is related to the court case.
On May 15, Fairholme lawyers deposed Ugoletti. His deposition is under seal, but Fairholme lawyers suggested in the August filing that he contradicted his December 2013 statement, made in a federal court filing.
The lawyers also said that a deposition of former Fannie Chief Financial Officer Susan McFarland indicated Ugoletti’s sworn statement “is not credible.”
Ugoletti did not return a call for comment.