Or Was That The Loan Arranger? Sallie Mae Buys a Bye

We have been wondering where Boehner's Sugar Mama, Sallie Mae, has been among this rustling around in Albany among all the crooked paper trails. While small potatoes outfits like Student Loan XPress run by people with names like "The Breeze" have been fair game, Sallie Mae, which controls over half the $18 billion student loan biz, remains off the radar. We thought.

Now it appears that Sallie Mae was under investigation all along, and now they have paid their way out of this or any future investigation. How? $2 million and a pledge to sign a "code of conduct." Wonder is Cuomo in Albany was feeling the squeeze by the big money in Washington, or if it just capitulated on its own?

Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest lender to college students, has agreed to pay $2 million into a fund to educate high school students and their parents about student loan options, in order to resolve an investigation into its relationships with colleges and universities.

The company also agreed to adopt a code of conduct prepared by the office of the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, who announced the agreement at a news conference in Manhattan today.

Mr. Cuomo’s office has already reached settlements with eight universities and with Citibank, which like Sallie Mae adopted the code of conduct and agreed to a $2 million payment.

The code of conduct “stops the bad practices that we’ve been talking about for the past few weeks,” Mr. Cuomo said at the news conference. Because Sallie Mae and Citibank, two very large lenders, have signed on, pressure will increase on other lenders to adopt the code as well, he said. . . .