The US is suing the Bank of America for investor fraud over the sale of $850m worth of residential mortgage-backed securities.

The lawsuits are the latest legal headache for the second-largest US bank, which has already agreed to pay in excess of $45bn to settle disputes stemming from the 2008 financial crisis.

While most of the cases Bank of America has already confronted pertain to its acquisitions of brokerage Merrill Lynch and home lender Countrywide, the two civil lawsuits filed on Tuesday pertain to mortgages the government said were originated, securitised and sold by Bank of America’s legacy businesses.

The residential mortgage-backed securities at issue, known as RMBS, were of a higher credit quality than subprime mortgage bonds and dated to about January 2008, the government said, months after many Wall Street banks first reported billions of dollars in writedowns on their holdings of subprime mortgage securities.

The justice department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed parallel lawsuits in US district court in Charlotte, North Carolina, accusing Bank of America of making misleading statements and failing to disclose important facts about the pool of mortgages underlying a sale of securities to investors in early 2008.

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