SURVIVING ON MAIN STREET

Geauga County’s prosecuting attorney, David P. Joyce has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of the county “and all other similarly situated counties in Ohio,” against MERS and everybody else who used the MERS “scheme,” alleging that they violated Ohio law requiring that, “each and every mortgage assignment must be recorded in the proper Ohio county recording office,” and that by doing so, they avoided paying the counties the attendant recording fees.

Former Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann says the case does accurately represent what he referred to as “black letter law” in the State of Ohio for the last 200 years.  He also described the case as being fairly narrow in that it’s really going after the recording fees that were not paid to each county when the defendants used the MERS system, but in doing so, the case is also going to have to establish the problems with the over all MERS operation.

 Obviously this is one to watch, both for the homeowners in Ohio, and elsewhere.  The ramifications, should the case be successful, could very well spread to other states, as the Ohio counties involved could receive hundreds of thousands or millions of much-needed dollars.  FULL STORY

The arguments about title and improper assignment of notes being made by lawyers and pro se litigants may in fact be right, at this point there’s no question that Wall Street and commercial mortgage bankers screwed things up big time.  They failed to comply with numerous laws governing the transfer of real property, failed to comply with the applicable articles of the Uniform Commercial Code or the rules set forth in Pooling and Servicing Agreements, and they attempted to correct these improper acts by creating fraudulent documents and robo-signed affidavits.

However, even the most experienced foreclosure defense attorneys who continue to argue with increasing skill that the securitization of mortgages should preclude foreclosure, find that judges are more interested in the fact that their clients haven’t made their mortgage payments… and the foreclosures march on, and on, and on.

The question for a judge hearing such a case brought by a delinquent homeowner is… how were homeowners damaged by the inadequacies of the securitization process?  The answer is, and let’s be honest about this… they weren’t.  A homeowner was not prejudiced by the fact that the bank did things wrong as far as the securitization process is concerned.  And homeowners wouldn’t care about any of this… had their bank just modified their loan as they requested in the first place.  CONTINUE READING

Martin Mandelman; Mandelman Matters