Matt Weidner – Fighting For The American People

Posts Tagged ‘foreclosure crisis’

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The fact is foreclosure will happen anyway, no matter who holds the note, Passidomo said. The reality is the borrower borrowed something from someone, and didn’t pay his debt, she said.

The most offensive thing about this quote is it’s coming from someone who wants to give away homes to banksters who are far more guilty than the homeowners they wan to throw into the street…

MORE HERE

From Abigail Field:

A shocking aspect of the proposed foreclosure fraud settlement among Bailed-Out Banks, the state attorneys general, and the Feds has rightly gotten a lot of attention, namely the Bailed-Out Banks’ ability to use other people’s money to pay their “penalty.” I confess, when I first heard about it, I figured it was a testament to the federal government’s craven capitulation to the Bailed Out Banks. (Let’s call them the B.O.B.s, rhymes with S.O.Bs.) But now I know it’s much worse than that, thanks to excellent reporting by David Dayen. The federal government really wants the B.O.Bs to use pension fund money to pay their “penalty.”

Now, readers know I’m not exactly a Pollyanna, but I feel like one now. See, I thought our federal government understood that the right way to penalize someone with a fine was to actually make them pay the bill. I thought the feds realized the best way to punish the banks was to have them cough up cash into a BP spill-type fund, and have 50 special masters (one per state) use it to pay down mortgages, thereby punishing banks and helping homeowners. I just figured the Feds had rushed things so much, doing essentially no investigation, that they didn’t have the goods to leverage a better deal. But no. The Feds see the banks’ ability to spend firefighters’, teachers’ and cops’ money as a design feature, not a flaw.

ABIGALE FIELD

It looks like the Florida House of Representatives will move on Wednesday, February 8 to hear the Florida (un)Fair Foreclosure Act.

The bill number currently under consideration is Committee Substitute for House Bill 213.  Please take the time to read the bill in full here.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE CLICK HERE AND CALL THESE LEGISLATORS

It is expecially important to call the chairperson Dorothy Hukill and make sure she knows this is a bad, bad bill:

Capitol Office
204 House Office Building
402 South Monroe Street
Tallahassee, FL 32399-1300
Phone: (850) 488-6653

But make sure you hit all the legislators on the committee.  They need to know that this bill it toxic and will be very, very controversial. It is still being amended and more bad news is being thrown into this every day.  The bottom line is it is a reward to the banksters that caused all this mess, paid for by the little guy.

Among the most disturbing aspects is that it would turn some foreclosures into “show cause” proceedings that could deprive a homeowner of the right to raise defenses and could result in a sale in as little as 90 days!

The bill would require some Defendants to make payments to the pretender lender as a condition of having their voice heard in court.

The bill would apply to all foreclosures currently pending

DO IT CALL THE MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE BEFORE WEDNESDAY

robo and this is why….

If we are a nation where justice is blind, should we not investigate this possibility before we give the offending financialinstitutions another free pass?

The essence of an effective capitalist system is rules and accountability. For markets, and our larger economy to work, important players cannot be permitted to make up their own rules. In all likelihood, a settlement next week means these serious questions will never be answered.

So here’s the thing.  A foreclosure trial should be a simple matter.  An easy case for a big shot foreclosure firm….right?  Let’s take a hypothetical example.  The Plaintiff (or some version of the Plaintiff…we’ll get to that later) filed the Original Note years ago. They’ve got an Original, wet ink note that was taken out with American Broker’s Conduit in 2007.  The note file with the court in 2009 is endorsed in blank so any old person can come in court, file the lawsuit and throw my client out into the street…..right?

Well, hold on there Nellie. Slow down a bit.  Let me take you for a little trip down the rabbit hole.  First a little date to keep in mind.  American Home Mortgage filed for bankruptcy in August 2007, just a few days after my loan was closed.  According to pleadings filed in court, shortly after the filing 6,500 people were fired all across the country.  So a first question I have is just how did my little ole loan get endorsed by some employee of AHMSI in the few short days between when it closed and when AHMSI filed bankruptcy?  (More on that later too.)  You know how things are when the ship is sinking….I’d imagine everyone knew the ship was going down so were all these folks really Johnnie on the Spot and really dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s? I mean while the building was on fire and everyone was running up and down the hallway screaming, was my particular girl sitting there calmly endorsing away millions of dollars in promissory notes?(Stamp, sign; Stamp, sign; Stamp, sign)  I just don’t picture that and, as I’ll get to later, this probably was not happening.

AHMSI and CA case details – GOOD ref-2

AHMSI-1

American Home Mortgage bankruptcy questions and court filing

AHMSI-2

Next, I started carefully examining all these bankruptcy filings and litigation cases related to the AHMSI bankruptcy and it seems there’s real questions about whether and when and what parts of loans of these bankrupt companies actually were transferred out. You see the loans were like pigs that were sent off to slaughterhouses. Pieces and parts were chopped up and sent off to different places…the loans themselves were sold off to one group of investors (who knows if they were double sold?), then the rights to service or collect the payments on the loans were either retained by related entities, or those rights were sold off to other companies.  In subsequent lawsuits filed in federal bankruptcy court all sort of allegations are made about the improper transfer of these parts of the pig.

Another key part of this case comes in the name of the Plaintiff that sued my client to foreclose, American Home Mortgage Servicing.  Well, when they first filed the suit in 2009, I didn’t like the way the name was all loose and not pled in a proper legal fashion, so I demanded they give me the details that our pleading rules require….tell me what state of incorporation, tell me you’re in good standing, tell me there are no other competing entities….and well, here we are three years later and it seems like those questions I raised right at the beginning were well founded and justified.  You see, as the litigation shows, there were in fact two versions of AHMSI, pre-bankruptcy and the fire-sale rising from the ashes, post bankruptcy.  I challenged capacity and it seems that challenge was well-taken at the time….but that was never disclosed to me or the court in my case. (More on that later)

Me being a curious type, I sent detailed, painstaking discovery pointed at AHMSI asking all kinds of questions, the who, what, when, where and hows of every aspect of this loan and the litigation…and guess what responses I got?  NOTHING.  Not a single question answered.  And how did they pull this trick off?  Well, they went behind my back and told the court in an ex-parte motion that the loan had sold and that AHMSI now had nothing to do with this loan. I objected but the court denied my objection, letting AHMSI slither away not answering a single damn question.  For two years now, I’ve kept pointing back to the fact that I was denied those questions, filing motions to compel, trying to take depositions, but the new plaintiff’s attorneys (same as the old plaintiff’s attorneys) scream that the old plaintiff isn’t their client and they cannot be made to answer any questions.  They maintained this position until right up at the eve of trial when they told the court they were going to call their former client as a witness in order to answer questions and get in information they need in order to prove their case.

Well, along comes another interesting thing about this case.  You see, the Plaintiff’s attorney files a “Notice of Non-Reliance on Assignment”.  You see, AHMSI had apparently contracted with a company LPS or DOCS, LLC to generate the documents it needs to foreclose.  Now AHMSI and LPS Docs are in a good old fashioned legal war, AHMSI is suing LPS accusing its old friend of doing shady things as part of its document creation operation.  Nothing like a little fratricide to spice my case up a little bit.  Now, I’m not sure what a “Notice of Non-Reliance” is…I checked the rule books and there’s no mention of such a motion in all of legal history, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing out on something new and exciting so I filed a “Notice of Reliance on Assignment”.  You see, I wanted to bring to the court’s attention the fact that the Plaintiff had produced a document , filed it with the court and were now trying to run away from it like a frat boy runs away from a girl with….well, you fill in the blank.

READ THIS DOCUMENT VERY CAREFULLY

Well, the “Notice of Non-Reliance” brings us to another interesting point in this little saga called, “The Importance of Being Earnest”.  You see, the Florida Bar issued an ethics opinion which dealt with exactly the kind of situation presented here.  How do I know this is the situation.  Well, I just received documents that were sealed as part of the Nevada Attorney General’s Lawsuit against Lender Processing Service.  In this lawsuit is a document that explains exactly how LPS employees are supposed to forge the signatures of other employees, but they don’t call it forgery, they call it “Surrogate Signing”.  The explain it in great detail…really, you just gotta read it here, complete with a picture perfect example of Linda Greene’s signature that everyone is supposed to copy.  It’s just mind blowing that they would make all this so clear and write it down as policy….apparently no one considered that this was called forgery and that if the signature was notarized it was notary fraud.  You see, I in fact have a Linda Greene signature in my case.  Now, as I read the Bar ethics opinion along with the just-released Nevada lawsuit, I believe my opposing counsel has an obligation to bring this directly to the court for consideration….after which I believe the court would have no choice but to dismiss the case and potentially sanction those parties involved. But that hasn’t happened yet.  I’ve asked my friend, the attorney on the other side just when she might make this meeting, but all my pestering emails just get ignored.

Which brings us back to another interesting subject, the promissory note at issue in this case.  I have well founded reason to believe the note at issue in this case was not in fact endorsed by the person whose name appears on the face of the document.  How?  Well, remember the whole picture of the building burning and people running around on fire because 6,500 people are about to get fired in the days just after my loan closed?  That’s certainly part of it, but there’s more.  Much, much more.  The other side knows it and I know it, but they are stuck in some kind of a dangerously delusional world where they think the judge ain’t gonna care about the pleadings I have filed.  Maybe they’re right, maybe the judge will just ignore all of this.

Now, here’s the thing. I can’t just stand up in court and blather on like I can here and make this case.  In court, I can’t just stand up and start making all these wild, accusatory statements and expect the judge to take them into consideration.  Even if the judge wanted to , our rules of procedure require me to go through a painstaking process to make sure the evidence is properly presented and before the court.  And so while it’s just taken me  bit over an hour to tell parts of this story here, preparing then presenting this story in court will take many, many, many hours.  Collecting the evidence, organizing the evidence, then getting it into a form for the court to consider over the screaming objections of my opponents.  This truly sets up as a battle royale.  Will justice prevail?  You just never know until the very last minute.