Forty-one former employees of Fannie Mae on Wednesday sued the company, its chief executive and Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte for alleged defamation related to their dismissals in April.
The ex-employees of the government-controlled mortgage giant are seeking damages amounting to more than $2 million per person, according to complaints filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia, which were distributed to the media by their lawyers.
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The FHFA and Fannie Mae did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Fannie
The legal challenge comes as the Trump administration is weighing a sale of shares in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, targeting an offering as early as this year at a valuation that would raise about $30 billion for the government.
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The dismissals have been linked to alleged violations of Fannie's matching gift program, which matches employees' charitable donations to "a cause or organization of their choice" of up to $5,000 annually.
Three Democratic lawmakers questioned the mass termination of mostly Indian-American employees around the time it was announced. Representative Suhas Subramanyam joined two House colleagues in writing an
The lawmakers expressed concern that participation in the program and donations to Indian-American organizations "may have been used as a pretext to make indiscriminate cuts to Fannie Mae's workforce and to tarnish employees' reputations" without proper investigation.
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The complaints filed in Fairfax said that the former employees were summarily ousted by email and phone, and "despite multiple requests" have never been given any evidence to support the claims against them.
It's not the first lawsuit to emerge from the mass termination. Last month, another complaint was filed in the District of Columbia by 66 of the former employees, all of Indian descent, alleging that the removals amounted to discrimination based on national origin and age.
