A lawsuit was filed in San Francisco April 9 accusing the financing unit of Toyota Motor of discriminating against black and Hispanic car buyers in setting the interest rates on their dealer-arranged loans, according to the New York Times.

The suit was filed in California Superior Court by a team of lawyers that includes Bill Lann Lee, who ran the Justice Department's civil rights division during the Clinton administration, according to the Times. Lee is now a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco.

In recent weeks, the legal team has quietly filed similar cases against the financing arm of Honda Motor and WFS Financial, the auto credit unit of Westcorp, the Times reported.

All the cases contend that the auto finance companies have allowed their dealers to discriminate against blacks and Hispanics by adding extra points — called dealer markup or "point spread" — to the interest rates that the finance companies established for borrowers based on credit histories, the Times said.

A result, the lawsuits say, is that blacks and Hispanics paid higher interest rates than whites with similar credit ratings, according to the Times.

The lawsuits, like similar cases filed in recent years against other auto dealers, ask the courts to bar the dealer markup practice and reimburse consumers for discriminatory practices in the past, the Times reported.

A Toyota representative said April 9 that the company was committed to fair lending and permitted its dealers to add no more than 3 points to their loans, according to the Times.

A spokesman for Honda declined to comment, the Times said. WFS Financial did not respond to a phone call made to its corporate office April 9, the newspaper reported.