LAURENTIAN FACES LOAN MESS
Laurentian Bank of Canada fell the most in almost nine years after reporting it found customer misrepresentations on some mortgage loans it sold to another firm. Shares of the Montreal-based bank fell 7.7 per cent to $56.11 Tuesday. An audit “identified documentation issues and client misrepresentations” with some mortgages from its B2B Bank unit that were sold to a third-party firm, the lender said Tuesday in its annual report. It said it will repurchase about $89 million of those mortgages in the first quarter, or 4.9 per cent of such loans sold to the firm. It will buy back an additional $91 million of mortgages “inadvertently” sold to the firm, also in the first quarter. “This is largely a documentation and securitization-eligibility issue,” chief executive officer Francois Desjardins said in a call with analysts. “It is not material for the bank, its operations, its funding nor its capital.”