Martin Baumann, the chief financial officer of Freddie Mac since 2003, has resigned from the mortgage finance giant, the company said this morning.
Baumann had planned to stay with Freddie for only two years when he joined in 2003, but he agreed to stay another year, a company spokeswoman said, according to reports.
Baumann’s resignation won’t affect the company’s timetable to state fourth-quarter and full-year results for 2005 in May, the company said. The company’s earnings haven’t been current since 2003, when an accounting scandal resulted in a $5 billion earnings restatement.
Both Fannie Mae and its fellow government-sponsored enterprise, Freddie Mac, have been rocked by accounting scandals. In December 2004, Fannie Mae replaced Franklin Raines, its chairman and CEO, who announced he was taking early retirement, and Fannie Mae’s chief financial officer, Timothy Howard, resigned Dec. 21.
In early February of this year, the Bush administration said Congress should create a new regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and direct it to cut the approximately $1.4 trillion investment portfolios held by the government-sponsored enterprises.
Eugene McQuade, Freddie Mac’s president and chief operating officer, will take over “immediately” as CFO on an interim basis while the company looks for a replacement for Baumann, the company said in a statement.
“We have made great progress over the past three years, including completing the restatement of prior years’ earnings and rebuilding the company’s accounting policy function,” Baumann said in a statement. “This was challenging work, and we accomplished a great deal. I am equally proud of the dedicated and talented team we have assembled to help guide the Finance function into the future.”
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