As the clock runs out on a three-year statute of limitations, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has filed a flurry of lawsuits to recoup losses tied to the largest wave of bank failures during the financial crisis.
The agency is waging legal battles against hundreds of directors and officers that it claims had a hand in their bank's demise, failures that cost the deposit insurance fund billions of dollars. These cases, however, may take years to play out in the courts, as the judicial process has been slow-going.
The FDIC has filed 76 lawsuits against 574 former bank executives since 2008. Thirty-two of those cases were filed in the first eight months of 2013, nearly triple the number filed the same time last year, according to the agency. The surge in filings correlates with the peak of bank failures rooted in the crisis, which reached 157 in 2010.