In what’s claimed to be the third-largest settlement of a class-action suit by investors in non-agency MBS, Royal Bank of Scotland agreed to pay $275 million in cash. Investors led by the New Jersey Carpenters Vacation Fund claimed that RBS did not disclose that loans included in Harborview MBS that it sold failed to meet the deals’ underwriting guidelines. The settlement is awaiting approval by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Separately, the remains of Lehman Brothers settled...

Although some industry groups said it is too soon to get into another massive overhaul, others pointed to the forest of overlapping and confusing documents as a good place to start.

Although some regulators have anxiety problems with nonbank servicers, Fannie Mae apparently does not. Meanwhile, a large mortgage vendor M&A deal could be revealed late Friday.

Fannie Mae reported net earnings of $6.5 billion in the fourth quarter late this week, revealing that the company’s total dividend payments to the U.S. Treasury will exceed the $116.1 billion that the GSE has drawn since being put into conservatorship in late 2008. The company will pay the Treasury $7.2 billion in dividends in March. With the March dividend payment, Fannie will have paid a total of $121.1 billion in dividends to the Treasury – the equivalent amount of its entire draw plus an additional $5.0 billion.

A recently unearthed Treasury Department “action memorandum” from 2010 makes clear the White House’s commitment to ensuring that common shareholders in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should never have access “to any positive earnings from the GSEs in the future.” The memo, approved by then-Secretary Timothy Geithner, asks that Treasury waive the GSEs’ periodic commitment fee for 2011.

Some five and a half years after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the remains of Lehman Brothers settled the legal claim by Freddie Mac stemming from $1.2 billion in loans made by the GSE to the investment bank just before the financial collapse. Judge Shelley Chapman of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan approved this week the settlement that would see Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. pays $767 million to the GSE to close out Freddie’s bid to collect on the unpaid loan.

Countrywide Financial, now owned by Bank of America, is asking a federal judge to sanction the Federal Housing Finance Agency and to appoint a special master to investigate what CFC says is the FHFA’s “noncompliance” in producing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac documents in the company’s defense against the GSEs’ $26.6 billion MBS lawsuit. According to a motion filed earlier this month in the U.S. District Court, Central District Court of California, CFC says the FHFA is defying the court’s October order to produce – either in a timely manner or not at all – documents from Fannie’s and Freddie’s single-family businesses.

State regulators are trying to take the National Mortgage Licensing System mortgage call report to the next level in terms of analytical capability. If the vendor side of the industry has its way, this will be accomplished in a manner that relies on the latest in technology to make the compliance process easier for lenders and report users. As the annual NMLS conference in Miami was winding down late this week, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors was, as of press time, set to convene a panel of ...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency's oversight of a nearly three-year-old initiative designed to improve the performance of residential servicers working for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has "significant limitations" and is in dire need of supervision, according to a new report from the agency’s Inspector General. The FHFA’s Servicing Alignment Initiative, introduced in April 2011, requires Fannie and Freddie to align their servicing requirements in four key areas: borrower contact, delinquency management practices, loan modifications and foreclosure timelines.

Fed: G-Fee Hikes Would Have Minimal Impact on Agency Originations. Increases to guaranty fees under consideration by the Federal Housing Finance Agency would directly reduce the dollar volume of new agency originations by less than 1.0 percent, according to new research published by the Federal Reserve. In December, then-FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco announced a plan to increase the base g-fee for all new Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages by 10 basis points, update the up-front g-fee grid and eliminate the upfront 25 basis point adverse market fee that has been assessed on all mortgages purchased by Fannie and Freddie since 2008.