Roland E. Arnall (March 29, 1939 – March 17, 2008) was an American businessman and diplomat. As the owner of ACC Capital Holdings, he became a billionaire with Ameriquest Mortgage. He was co-founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and from 2006 until shortly before his death he was the United States Ambassador to the Netherlands.
Personal life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Arnall#Personal_life
Roland Arnall was born on March 29, 1939 in Paris, France. His parents were Eastern European Jews who had fled to Paris. During World War II, Arnall was raised as a Roman Catholic in a French village. He was kept unaware of being a Jew until after the war had ended, when he was six years old.[2][3]
After the war, Arnall and his family moved to Montreal, Canada.[4] In the late 1950s they relocated to the United States, and for a while Arnall sold flowers on the streets of Los Angeles, California.[5]
In 1977 Arnall, a longtime supporter of Israel, helped found the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance. He served for 16 years on the California State University board of trustees.
He purchased singer Engelbert Humperdinck's 10-acre (40,000 m2) Los Angeles estate for $30 million. He also bought a ranch in Aspen, Colorado for $46 million from movie mogul Peter Guber.
Ameriquest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Arnall#Ameriquest
Arnall was the billionaire owner of ACC Capital Holdings, the parent company of Ameriquest, which was once one of the United States's largest sub-prime mortgage lenders. By the end of 2005 two of Arnall's companies, Ameriquest and Argent, had funded almost $ 75 billion in subprime loans.[6] A major factor of this development was Arnall's origination of the stated income loan, meaning loans were given without verification of income.[7] In early 2006, the company announced a $325 million settlement with state attorneys general and law enforcement agencies and financial regulators in 49 states and the District of Columbia who had accused Ameriquest of misrepresenting and failing to disclose loan terms, charging excessive loan origination fees and inflating appraisals to qualify borrowers for loans.[8]
In 2007 Arnall got out of the mortgage business having sold most of it to Citigroup for an undisclosed amount.
