California's attorney general announced that the state filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Countrywide Financial Corp., its chairman and chief executive officer and its president. The defendants are accused of deceitfully herding borrowers into risky mortgages with the sole objective of reselling the mortgages on the secondary market at huge profits. Over in Chicago, the Illinois attorney general filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against Countrywide. That lawsuit follows a nine-month probe by the state and accuses the company of engaging in unfair and deceptive conduct on a large scale in creating, originating, marketing and servicing unnecessarily risky and costly mortgage loans to borrowers who could not afford them.
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