Whistleblower News From The Inside -- October 6, 2017

By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team

Interior Department whistleblower resigns after reassignment from climate change duties — The Interior Department employee who blew the whistle on the Trump administration for reassigning him from measuring climate change to a different department has resigned.  Joel Clement, who worked at Interior for more than seven years and continued on in his new accounting role for three months, said he left after losing all hope things would change, saying “the checkmarks in the cons column just kept adding up.” CNN

Mortgage company president pleads guilty to $2.5M Fraud — The president of a Massachusetts mortgage company has pleaded guilty in a $2.5 million mortgage fraud. The U.S. attorney’s office says 68-year-old Robert Pena, of Falmouth, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and six counts of wire fraud.  Prosecutors say the company was supposed to service loans, then send payments on to the government-backed mortgage enterprise Ginnie Mae.  Instead, Pena took money that borrowers sent in to pay off their mortgages, or which were supposed to go into escrow accounts or mortgage insurance premiums.  He then made false reports to Ginnie Mae about the status of the loans. NYT

Whistleblower lawsuit filed against art museum, claims financial wrongdoing — A former Grand Rapids Art Museum administrator has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the museum, claiming he was terminated because he sought to stop financial violations. Donald Neil Bremer claims he was fired as the museum’s chief operating officer in June because he pressed to stop the reallocation of donor-restricted funds for general operating purposes.  Bremer was hired in June 2015 after leaving his job as director of the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo.  In the lawsuit, Bremer claims he advised GRAM Chief Executive Officer Dana Friis-Hansen and other administrators, on several occasions, that funds were being improperly diverted. MLive Michigan