When asked about a payout from the settlement, Don Byas said, “I haven’t heard a thing since” the lawsuit was settled.
Did plaintiff Maudestine McLeary get any financial compensation? “Nothing. I haven’t seen anything,” she said.
Fellow plaintiffs Samuel Wilson, Mary Carr, Bob Currie, Kenneth Hanshaw, Michael Lieteau, John Geoghegan and Arthur Wilson also did not remember receiving settlement payouts from Citibank.
Dale Freeman, a plaintiff who is an operations manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said the settlement did not provide money to those who joined the class-action lawsuit, but did push the bank to help minorities get future loans.
“Here was a settlement that didn’t necessarily go to the people from a funding standpoint, but they made sure that [mortgage] money was allocated to future folks,” he said.
The lawsuit, “Buycks-Roberson et al v. Citibank Federal Savings Bank,” was settled in 1998 when Citibank agreed to pay the plaintiffs, all African-Americans in the Chicago area who claimed Citibank discriminated against them on the basis of their race during the loan application process.
The law firms for the successful plaintiffs split $950,000 of the $1.3 million total payoff from Citibank, of which Obama billed $23,000. A total of $60,000 went to the named plaintiffs, and $360,000 supposedly went to 183 other plaintiffs.
Renee Brooks, one of the named plaintiffs, told TheDC that Citibank provided her with everything it promised.
Buycks-Roberson and Roberson declined to comment.
Hans Bader, senior attorney and counsel for special projects at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told TheDC, “When it comes to class actions, the judicial system has often failed to protect class members from being ripped off by their lawyers (including their use of it for ideological causes).”
The Daily Caller was able to contact 18 of the 186 plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
