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The question is whether a self assessed value is fraud. I could tell a bank “in my judgement my house is worth a billion dollars so loan me 500m” If I give the bank access to my house etc and they loan on that basis, it seems hard for them to argue “he overstated the value of his property.” They could review for reasonableness my belief and seemed to believe it reasonable.
No I'm pretty sure that's fraud.
You may have an intuition that you wouldn't be prosecuted for it, which is true, because they'd just laugh in your face instead.
But if you were someone who for some reason had the credibility to get them to believe you and the deal went through, I'm pretty sure that's just fraud and you can be prosecuted for it.
The courts don't have a legal standard of 'that's just, like, your opinion, man'.
They have standards like 'reasonable belief' and 'mens rea' and things like that.
Those standards can be hard to pin down or to prove, but they do exist and are used regularly in cases like this. It's not just 'anything goes because all knowledge is probabilistic and all beliefs are subjective'.
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Did they?
The judgment cites an incident where the bank asks “are you aware of any other professional valuations?” And they lie and say no. That doesn’t sound like the bank wants to use self valuation.
Agreed that would be fraud if true. But that’s consistent with my position. Lying about say sq footage is different from your opinion about the value per sq footage.
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