(Bloomberg News) Daniel Mudd, the former Chief Executive Officer of Fannie Mae, and Richard Syron, ex-CEO of Freddie Mac, were sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for understating by hundreds of billions of dollars the subprime loans held by the agencies.

The lawsuits filed today in Manhattan federal court were followed by an SEC statement that it had entered into non- prosecution agreements with each lender. Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise which issues almost half of all mortgage-backed securities, and Freddie Mac, the McLean, Virginia-based mortgage-finance company, had "agreed to accept responsibility" for their conduct, the SEC said.

In the lawsuits, the SEC said Syron, Mudd and others understated the lenders' exposure to subprime mortgage loans. From 2007 to 2008, Freddie Mac executives said the company's exposure was between $2 billion and $6 billion when it was actually as high as $244 billion, according to one SEC complaint. From 2006 to 2008, Washington-based Fannie Mae executives said the firm's exposure to subprime mortgage and reduced documentation loans was about $4.8 billion when it was nearly 10 times greater, according to the regulator.

"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was," Robert Khuzami, direct of the SEC's enforcement division, said today in a statement. "These material misstatements occurred during a time of acute investor interest in financial institutions' exposure to subprime loans, and misled the market about the amount of risk on the company's books."

Criticism Of SEC

The lawsuits, which together name six former executives at the government sponsored entities, come amid criticism from judges and lawmakers that the SEC hasn't done enough to hold individuals responsible for misconduct related to the housing crisis and financial market collapse that followed.

The two non-prosecution agreements require Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to "accept responsibility" for their conduct and to cooperate with the SEC probe of the former executives.

"Under the agreement, without admitting or denying liability, Fannie Mae has offered to accept responsibility for its conduct and to not dispute, contest or contradict a set of factual statements regarding the disclosures," Fannie Mae said today in a securities filing.

Individual Lawsuits

In the individual lawsuits, the SEC is seeking financial penalties, disgorgement and bars on them serving as officers or directors in other companies.

Also named as defendants are Patricia Cook, Freddie Mac's former executive vice president; Donald Bisenius, ex-senior vice president at Freddie Mac; Enrico Dallavecchia, who was chief risk officer for Fannie Mae; and Thomas Lund, Fannie's Mae's former executive vice president.

Mudd, now CEO of Fortress Investment Group LLC, was ousted when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were seized by regulators in September 2008. In a statement, he said the federal government and investors were aware of "every piece of material data about loans held by Fannie Mae."

"The government reviewed and approved the company's disclosures during my tenure, and through the present," Mudd said today in the statement. "Now it appears that the government has negotiated a deal to hold the government, and government-appointed executives who have signed the same disclosures since my departure, blameless -- so that it can sue individuals it fired years ago."

Mark Hopson, Syron's attorney at Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, didn't return a call seeking comment.

'Did Not Mislead'

Michael Levy, Lund's attorney at Bingham McCutchen LLP in Washington, said his client "did not mislead anyone. During a period of unprecedented disruption in the housing market, nobody worked more diligently or honestly to serve the best interests of both investors and homeowners."

Dallavecchia is now chief risk officer at PNC Financial Services Group. A phone call to Laurie Miller, his attorney at Nixon Peabody LLP, wasn't immediately returned.

During Mudd's tenure as CEO of Fannie Mae, from 2004 through its government takeover in 2008, the firm ramped up its business with lower-quality mortgages. Mudd said in a 2006 interview that he planned to expand the companies' holdings to include more higher-risk loans. Anything else would be "counterproductive," he told investors in March of that year.

In April 2007, Mudd said in testimony before lawmakers that the firm's exposure to subprime loans "remains minimal, less than 2.5 percent of our book."

At the same hearing, Syron said his firm hadn't "been heavily involved in subprime all along."

Within 18 months, U.S. regulators seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after losses on the soured loans pushed them to the brink of insolvency.

The cases are SEC v. Syron, 11-cv-09201, and SEC v. Mudd, 11-cv-09202, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).