HSBC, Barclays and RBS are among 15 Wall Street banks accused by a US investment firm, Cambridge Place Investment Partners, a fund from Boston, Massachusetts, of mis-selling a total of $2.4bn (£1.6bn) in mortgage-backed securities, on Friday.

It is also aiming JP Morgan, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. It could turn out to be a trial test for funds seeking reimbursement for their losses during the financial crisis.

It says that the banks did not take proper caution before packaging the loans into financial instruments and repeating untrue statements about the sub-prime mortgages in their prospectuses and sales pitches. It also pointed that the banks usually had agents on site and gave the mortgage lenders billions of Dollars in credit.

"The Wall Street bank defendants fostered the environment for, permitted, and profited from the mortgage originators' rampant violations of sound lending practices", the suit says.

Driven to profit from the lucrative securitization business, the defendants demanded enormous volumes of loans, leading to erosion in lending standards.

The suit declares that Barclays and the other British banks guaranteed the investors that the employees were on-site with the largest lenders "quality controlling" the underwriting process.

The case is being handled by New York law firm, Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman. If the claimants win, they will get their money back and return the securities to the banks. The institutions will then again be burdened by the devious loans.