A former executive at Colonial Bank, which collapsed in part because of its close ties to the now-bankrupt Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp, is expected to plead to criminal charges on Wednesday.

Catherine Kissick is expected to plead to charges before U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, the same judge handling the criminal fraud case against the former chairman of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, Lee Farkas, according to court records.

No details of the criminal charges were available but such plea hearings are typically held when a defendant is expected to plead guilty. A lawyer for Kissick was not immediately available for comment.

The bank and mortgage firm both collapsed in August 2009 and federal prosecutors have accused Farkas of a fraud scheme that involved losses of $1.9 billion and could include billions of dollars more in losses to federal housing programs.

A civil suit filed last year by Bank of America on behalf of an investor fund that TBW ran accused Kissick of being involved in the fraud by knowingly accepting about $150 million in nonexistent loans from TBW as collateral and attempting to help cover up the firm's growing financial problems.

She served as senior vice president and director of Colonial Bank's Institutional Services Division and Mortgage Warehouse Lending division, the suit said.

Colonial Bank, a unit of now-bankrupt Colonial BancGroup , was one of the 50 largest U.S. banks before it collapsed.

Last week the former treasurer at TBW, Desiree Brown, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bank, securities and wire fraud, the first figure to do so in one of the biggest fraud cases so far stemming from the U.S. mortgage crisis.

She faces up to 30 years in prison and is scheduled to be sentenced in June. Brown has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors who plan to try Farkas in early April.

Brown told Brinkema at her plea hearing last week that there were others involved in the eight-year fraud scheme, but did not identify them.

(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky, editing by Matthew Lewis)