One Georgia mortgage broker isn’t giving up his license without a fight.
Georgia state regulators have revoked the license of Millennium Group Inc., a mortgage brokerage operated by Shawn McClary in Atlanta. A cease and desist order banning McClary from the mortgage business has also been issued by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance.
“Evidence existed that showed that the Millennium Group and Mr. McClary made misrepresentations in loan files submitted to mortgage lenders and worked with an unlicensed individual,” according to a statement from the department.
“Those are prohibited acts,” Rod Carnes, Georgia Deputy Commissioner for Non-Depository Financial Institutions, said in a brief interview with MortgageDaily.com.
The department also revoked the license of Central Mortgage and Investments, also of Atlanta. The state claims that company “made misrepresentations in loan files submitted to mortgage lenders.”
Carnes said he is prevented from discussing details of either case.
Calls to Central Mortgage were sent to the voice mail of Daniel Crawford. He did not return a phone call to comment.
But in an interview, McClary vehemently denied the charges and said he plans to fight the state’s attempt to take his license and bar him from the brokerage business.
“I knew nothing about this (final order),” McClary said. “I found out about it from some friends in the industry. I just got off the phone with an attorney.
“I’m working to get it reversed,” he said.
Georgia, and in particular the Atlanta area, has been a hotbed of mortgage fraud. But McClary said his case is about accusations of doing business with an unlicensed appraiser, and not mortgage fraud.
“They had me doing business with an unlicensed entity,” he said. “This has nothing to do with fraud.”
McClary was vague on some details of the case, but said the accusations center around a disputed appraisal. He said he was working on a loan for a customer on a piece of property that had appraised for $180,000.
But the appraiser, who McClary did not identify, told McClary the appraisal should have been for $160,000.
“This loan was never even submitted,” McClary said. “The appraiser accused us of altering the appraisal, but we don’t even have the software to do something like that.
“We didn’t alter the appraisal,” he said.
