Freddie Mac / FRE

Freddie Mac's trading floor. (Photo: Courtesy of company.)
About Freddie Mac
8200 Jones Branch Dr., McLean, Va. 22102
www.freddiemac.com
|
703-903-2000
Founded: 1970 | Local employees: 5,006
Industry: Financial Services | Category: Top 100 Companies
Four years after disclosing accounting problems that plunged the company into scandal, swept out top executives, and resulted in the restatement of past earnings by billions of dollars, Freddie Mac is trying to put its house in order by resuming a basic function of any public company: issuing timely financial reports.
In March 2006, the company issued its first timely annual report since 2002, and it predicted it would get its quarterly financial reporting back on track in the second half of 2007.
The delayed recovery frustrated Freddie Mac's leadership, left shareholders with limited information and provoked criticism from regulators.
In August 2006, citing weaknesses in Freddie Mac's internal systems, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight prevailed in asking Freddie Mac to voluntarily limit its growth. The agreement restricts the expansion of Freddie Mac's mortgage investments, a major source of profit, until the company returns to timely financial reporting.
One of the executives responsible for rebuilding Freddie Mac's troubled financial systems, finance chief Martin F. Baumann, left in March 2006. In October, the company announced it was replacing him with Anthony S. "Buddy" Piszel, a former finance chief of Health Net.
Long-stalled efforts to tighten supervision of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were renewed in March 2007 when the House Financial Services Committee advanced a bill that would give regulators the ability to restrict the scale of the companies' investments.
The Federal Reserve and other critics worry that the companies' holdings are so large that they could pose a risk to the financial system.
The Justice Department apparently ended a criminal probe of Freddie's accounting transgressions without any prosecutions, the company said in September 2006.
Company Leadership
| Richard F. Syron | Chairman and CEO |
| Eugene M. McQuade | President and COO |
| Patricia L. Cook | EVP |
| Martin F. Baumann | Former EVP and CFO |
| Anthony S. Piszel | EVP and CFO |
| Joseph A. Smialowski | EVP |
|
Richard F. Syron Chairman and CEO |
$15,554,809 Salary: $1,100,000 |
|
Eugene M. McQuade President and COO |
$10,752,905 Salary: $900,000 |
Did You Know
Like its rival Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac—the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.—was chartered by the federal government to promote homeownership, and it has two main sources of profit: It invests in mortgages, and it packages mortgages into securities for sale to other investors. As of January, it had guaranteed that investors would be paid interest and principal on $1.5 trillion of mortgage-backed securities, and it was holding $706.2 billion of mortgage-related investments.