Deutsche Bank to pay $145 mn over MBS sales in US

A securities unit of Deutsche Bank will pay $145 million to settle claims over losses on mortgage-backed securities it sold to US credit unions, a US banking regulator said Monday. The money is to mitigate the losses incurred with the failure of five credit unions -- member-owned savings and loan banks -- during the financial crisis, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) said. While agreeing to the payment, Deutsche Bank Securities did not admit guilt in the case. The NCUA said in a statement that it has sought to reduce the costs shared among its members for $3.3 billion in losses stemming from the five failures. "Deutsche Bank Securities is among the first major underwriters to come forward with a settlement proposal and we appreciate its efforts to resolve potential claims so that we can avoid the expense and delay of litigation," said NCUA board chairwoman Debbie Matz. "This settlement furthers our goal to minimize losses and thereby reduce the assessments that all credit unions will have to pay." The NCUA also said Monday that Citigroup had agreed to pay $20.5 million for its role in the sale of mortgage-backed securities to the failed credit unions. It said that meanwhile it had filed four lawsuits against other, unnamed securities firms for "misrepresentations" in the sale of securities. Banks worldwide have racked up hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of losses on investments in low-quality securitized US mortgages that were sold as high-quality investments during the 2000s before the collapse of the housing market.