Nearly a decade after America’s housing bubble caused a global financial crisis, the British bank Barclays (BCS) is fighting a lawsuit claiming it sold $31 billion in mortgage securities that proved to be “catastrophic failures.”

The US Justice Department’s 198-page lawsuit filed against Barclays in December was unusual, as many other banks have staved off litigation over the 2008 financial crisis by settling with regulators. Most recently, Deutsche Bank (DB) agreed to pay a whopping $7.2 billion for misleading investors in residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS).

Deutsche Bank and other major financial institutions allegedly sold RMBS backed by mortgages they knew were issued to borrowers who had no way of paying them back. The waves of defaults on these mortgages a decade ago not only hurt investors but also stoked a global recession the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Great Recession.

Speaking at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on Wednesday, Barclays CEO Jes Staley acknowledged that his bank wasn’t a saint in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. But he suggested the Justice Department had demanded a sum from the British bank that far exceeded what US banks agreed to pay.

“They have charged the banks with acting in the mortgage-backed security market in a way that created great harm to society. And I am the first to admit that there were transgressions, and that banks should pay a fine for those transgressions, including Barclays,” Staley told Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief, Andy Serwer.

But, he added, “I think the Department of Justice wanted to raise the level of penalty right after they got done making the settlements with JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and Citibank and Bank of America … All of the sudden it got taken to another level, and we just didn’t feel it was proper for us to settle on that basis.”

The banks that have settled have all agreed to multibillion-dollar deals with US federal and state regulators in recent years. Among the banks Staley mentioned, Morgan Stanley (MS) got off the easiest with a $2.6 billion settlement last year while Bank of America (BAC) ended up having to shell out the most with a $16.65 billion settlement in 2014.

Speaking to Yahoo Finance on Wednesday, Barclays’ Staley didn’t specify how much US regulators tried to extract from the British bank.

But the complaint demands the maximum penalties allowed under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA). The law firm Jones Day mentions that FIRREA penalties can be “potentially crippling” and amount to $1.1 million per day for continuing violations.

The Justice Department’s allegations

Barclays’ violations, according to the Justice Department’s complaint, occurred between the end of 2005 and 2007. During that time, the complaint said, Barclays securitized $31 billion worth of mortgage loans “which proved to be catastrophic failures.” Barclays represented to investors that the borrowers on these loans were more credit-worthy than they were, the Justice Department alleges. More than half of the loans backing up these RMBS defaulted.

“Barclays employees … saw for themselves that the pools were riddled with materially defective loans that should not have been included in the deals,” according to the Justice Department. The complaint also alleges that the head banker in charge of due diligence on subprime deals called one loan pool “about as bad as it can be” and said another “scares the sh*t out of me.”

At the same time that Barclays was securitizing billions of loans it knew were defective, the government alleges, it was also extending billions in financing to lenders who were obviously issuing loans to unfit borrowers.

“This pump-priming activity contributed to the housing bubble and to the ensuing crash, whose effects devastated the world economy in the Financial Crisis of 2008,” the complaint noted.

While the allegations in the complaint seem grave, they might not hold as much weight in a Justice Department led by President Donald Trump’s appointee, Jeff Sessions. Trump’s election has been seen as boon to Wall Street. The new president already pledged to undo the financial regulatory overhaul that came in the wake of the 2008 crisis at the heart of the complaint against Barclays.

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