

Dan Gilbert (Twitter photo)

Dan Gilbert uses "gangsters" when referring to the Justice Department, which says in a lawsuit that his company, Quicken Loans, fraudulently approved mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration. The government wants big fines, but he's fighting in federal court.

"We have this word. You’ve heard of gangsters. This is govsters," he said in an interview with the Detroit Free Press at his headquarters in downtown Detroit this week. "This is a holdup."

"The problem in this country is, if you’re going to treat the bad guys the same as the good guys, you’re not going to have a lot of good guys left," Gilbert said. "This is more than the money. It’s also our reputation. We didn’t work for 32 years, stay clean, not participate in the subprime business, have the lowest default rates with the highest volume" to give in to what Gilbert believes are unfair charges.

On Thursday afternoon, the Justice Department lawsuit against Gilbert's Quicken Loans comes up for a hearing before U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith in federal court in Detroit. Quicken Loans has filed a motion to throw out some evidence cited by the government, the Freep reports.

The April 2015 case could drag on for years. A trial won't begin until mid-2019 at the earliest.

The government has harshly criticize Quicken Loans' practices in court documents, saying it "created a fraudulent scheme of knowingly representing to (the government) certain FHA-insured mortgages had been underwritten with due diligence and were eligible for FHA insurance when, in fact, they did not." "This fraudulent scheme," the government said, "was wide-ranging, spanned five years, and involved the knowing participation of the highest levels of Quicken's management."

♦ Read original government suit.