The U.S. Justice Department is seeking a trial in February 2015 in its lawsuit against McGraw Hill Financial Inc.’s Standard & Poor’s unit over ratings on residential mortgage-backed securities, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. A jury trial on liability would take an estimated 54 days, according to a joint filing yesterday by the Justice Department and S&P in federal court in Santa Ana, Calif. The Justice Department wants a separate penalty phase to be decided by U.S. District Judge David Carter without a jury. The government seeks more than $5 billion in penalties from S&P, according to the filing. S&P is accused in the lawsuit of deceiving investors, including federally insured financial institutions, by giving its highest credit ratings to mortgage-backed securities and collateralized-debt obligations because it wanted to gain business from the issuers of the securities and not because the securities merited these ratings.
