SEC Corroborates Livinglies Position on Third Party Payment While Texas BKR Judge Disallows Assignments After Cut-Off Date


SEC Corroborates Livinglies Position on Third Party Payment While Texas BKR Judge Disallows Assignments After Cut-Off Date

By Neil Garfield
Garfield Gwaltney Kelley and White | LivingLies

Maybe this should have been divided into three articles:

  1. Saldivar: Texas BKR Judge finds Assignment Void not voidable. It never happened.
  2. Erobobo: NY Judge rules ownership of note is burden of the banks. Not standing but rather capacity to sue without injury.
  3. SEC Orders Credit Suisse to disgorge illegal profits back to investors. Principal balances of borrowers may be reduced. Defaults might not exist because notices contain demands that include money held by banks that should have been paid to investors.

But these decisions are so interrelated and their effect so far-reaching that it seems to me that if you read only one of them you might head off in the wrong direction. Pay careful attention to the Court’s admonition in Erobobo that these defenses can be waived unless timely raised. Use the logic of these decisions and you will find more and more judges listening with increasing care. The turning point is arriving and foreclosures — past, present and future — might finally get the review and remedies that are required in a nation of laws.

Continue reading “SEC Corroborates Livinglies Position on Third Party Payment While Texas BKR Judge Disallows Assignments After Cut-Off Date”

L. Randall Wray does it again – Requiem For MERS

L. Randall Wray does it again – Requiem For MERS

By Daniel Edstrom
DTC Systems, Inc.

L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics and Research Director for the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri-Kansas City posted an article on the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com) that I somehow missed.  The MERS design was woven in fraud.  Professor Wray points out the two main issues with MERS.  The first is that most foreclosures are illegal because those doing the foreclosing do not have legal standing.  Second the practices that create the foreclosure problems also mean that the mortgage backed securities are actually unsecured debt.  Professor Wray says that this means the banks must take them back, so they are toast.  He also states that it all comes back to MERS business model: it destroyed the chain of title.

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BofA Mortgage Morass Deepens on Promissory Notes Issues

BofA Mortgage Morass Deepens on Promissory Notes Issues

By Prashant Gopal and Jody Shenn – Nov 30, 2010

Testimony by a Bank of America Corp. employee in a New Jersey personal bankruptcy case may give more ammunition to homeowners and investors in their legal battles over defaulted mortgages.

Linda DeMartini, a team leader in the company’s mortgage- litigation management division, said during a U.S. Bankruptcy Court hearing in Camden last year that it was routine for the lender to keep mortgage promissory notes even after loans were bundled by the thousands into bonds and sold to investors, according to a transcript. Contracts for such securitizations usually require the documents to be transferred to the trustee for mortgage bondholders.

In the case, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Judith H. Wizmur on Nov. 16 rejected a claim on the home of John T. Kemp, ruling his mortgage company, now owned by Bank of America, had failed to deliver the note to the trustee. That could leave the trustee with no standing to take the property, and raises the question of whether other foreclosures could similarly be blocked.

Following the decision, the bank disavowed the statements by DeMartini, whom it had flown in from California to testify. It was the policy of Countrywide Financial Corp., acquired by Bank of America in July 2008, to deliver notes as called for in its securitization contracts, according to Larry Platt, an attorney at K&L Gates LLP in Washington designated by the bank to answer questions about the case. Continue reading “BofA Mortgage Morass Deepens on Promissory Notes Issues”