| News out of the State House is that the foreclosure mediation bill is out of conference committee. The bill will help homeowners get out of the mess that companies like Ameriquest, of which Deval Patrick was a board member (previous RMG coverage), have caused. The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote today on the legislation, which can be read here (pdf).
As the House gets ready to vote today on the bill, news out of Los Angeles is that the estate of Ameriquest Founder Roland Arnall is up for sale. The house that was paid for by sub-prime profits, or as Elizabeth Warren would say "one bad mortgage at a time", is reportedly on the market for a cool $150,000,000.
..from Lenny Lemmetellya, an unimpeachable source deep inside the Platinum Triangle real estate game, the lavish and downright legendary Los Angeles (CA) estate known as Owlwood is quietly being shopped around with an astronomical (but not surprising) asking price of $150,000,000.
(Gasps heard 'round the globe.)
The sprawling Holmby Hills spread (above), set between Sunset Boulevard and the famously clannish Los Angeles Country Club, has over the years been owned by a long list of high profile people. Owlwood's current owner, however, is a relatively low profile lady named Dawn Arnall, the billionaire widow of sub-prime mortgage mega-mogul Roland Arnall, who went to meet The Great Loan Processor in the Sky in 2008.
Long before he acted as George W. Bush's a U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands (2006-2008), Roland Arnall founded Ameriquest, the company that pretty much invented stated income home loans, otherwise known as "no-doc" or "liar's loans" in which little (or even no) verification of income or financial resources was required to secure a mortgage. Although his fortune has been greatly reduced by the recent mortgage meltdown and near collapse of the American economy, at one point Mister Arnall's estimated net worth ran up to around three billion bucks. Perhaps due to declining health and/or wisely prescient of the economic collapse just around the corner, Mister Arnall got out of the sub-prime mortgage business in 2007 when he sold most or all of his interest in Ameriquest to Citigroup for an undisclosed amount of money.
Continued after the jump |
| You may remember that it was our own Deval Patrick who made an infamous call to Citigroup Chairman Bob Rubin in 2007 which allowed Arnall to sell the company. Observers likened the transaction to Citigroup catching a falling knife, that Deval Patrick threw.
While the Massachusetts House votes today on legislation to help the victims of Deval Patrick and his cronies at Ameriquest, it's nice to know that Dawn Arnall is still taken care of. With a home worth $150,000,000. Ah to be the 1%. |
