Apple Products Review: bank foreclosure

KABOOM! BofA, GMAC, Chase, Wells, Citi, Onewest Face N.J. Foreclosure Freeze

This is coming in from multiple fronts...

Chink in the Armor

The State Supreme Court of NJ has ordered a halt to all foreclosure in the state of NJ.

This is most excellent news for the reason you may not realize:

NJ is owned by the Wall St. Bankers. Remember the movie Copland about a town in NJ owned and run by a bunch of NYC cops?

Guess
who used to be Governor of NJ? Corzine. Guess what his job was before
he became Governor? Head of Goldman Sachs. If you are a banker of
certain levels, you live in one of three places, Manhattan, Long
Island, or NJ (what exit?). NJ is owned and operated by the large NY
banking firms so for the Supreme Court to turn on them is stupendous
news.

V

www.chinkinthearmor.net

Matt Weidner

Apparently
the practices in foreclosure courts in New Jersey have gotten so out
of hand that the court has initiated an inquiry into the questionable
nature and inaccuracies of documents submitted in courts across the
entire state.

The
attached Order is filled with all sorts of crazy language like,
“Protecting the integrity of the judicial foreclosure process” and the
“need to restore integrity to the foreclosure process” and “due
process”.

Apparently
there were six “foreclosure Plaintiffs with a public record of
questionable practices” which the court felt compelled to address in
its supervisory capacity.

What in God’s name is going on up there in New Jersey?

Things
are just fine down here in Florida…..no problems with integrity or due
process or robo signing…no sir-ee, things are just fine thank y’all
very kindly.

Them banks ain’t run us over down here….no sir-ee, things are just fine thank y’all very kindly.

The integrity of our real property system is not in run…..no sir-ee, things are just fine thank y’all very kindly.

Us dumb
yokels down here in Florida cain’t hardly read all them fancy
newspapers and we ain’t heard ‘nuthin ’bout ‘nuthin going on in
Congress.

So you go on with yer investergatin…we’s jus fine down here in Sunnie Floreeduh!

Bloomberg

BofA, Lenders Face Possible N.J. Foreclosure Freeze

Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co.
and four other mortgage lenders and loan servicers face a possible
suspension of home foreclosures in New Jersey by Jan. 19 under a judge’s
order.

The action, announced today by New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, also covers Citigroup Inc.’s mortgage unit, Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC mortgage unit, OneWest Bank and Wells Fargo & Co.
The lenders were implicated in “robo-signing,” the submission of
hundreds or thousands of foreclosure claims that falsely swore to
personal knowledge of their contents, Rabner said.

The six
companies must “show cause why the processing of uncontested residential
foreclosure matters they have filed should not be suspended,” under an
order by Judge Mary C. Jacobson in state court in Trenton.

“It’s
important that the judiciary ensures that judges are not rubber-stamping
documents of questionable reliability,” Rabner said today in a
conference call with reporters.

Another
24 lenders and loan servicers with more than 200 residential foreclosure
actions each in 2010 must “demonstrate affirmatively that there are no
irregularities in their handling of foreclosure proceedings,” according
to an order by Judge Glenn A. Grant, administrative director of the
courts.

First U.S. State

Rabner
said New Jersey is the first U.S. state to take such an action. The
state’s courts received 21,752 new foreclosures in 2006 and have gotten
65,222 this year, according to Grant’s order. Only 6 percent of cases
were contested this year, meaning 94 percent lacked “any meaningful
adversarial proceeding,” according to the order.

Lawyers
in foreclosure cases must also certify that they have communicated to
employees at the mortgage companies that they have personally reviewed
all documents and that they are accurate, Rabner said.

Bank of
America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan are the three biggest U.S. home-loan
servicers, handling payment collections, debt modifications and
foreclosures on almost 50 percent of the $10.7 trillion of outstanding
mortgages, according to newsletter Inside Mortgage Finance.

Attorneys
general from all 50 states in October started probing mortgage
servicers after revelations that they may have acted illegally in having
employees sign affidavits that they didn’t review. GMAC Mortgage,
JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America were among companies that temporarily
halted foreclosures amid claims that the legal documents were
mishandled.

Suspended Forclosures

Thomas Kelly,
a JPMorgan spokesman, declined to comment on the New Jersey order.
Since September, the New York-based bank has suspended foreclosures in
40 states, including New Jersey, he said. It resumed foreclosures in
some of those states, he said.

Jumana Bauwens,
a spokeswoman for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, said
the bank is reviewing the judge’s order and can’t comment at this time.

Gina Proia, a spokeswoman for Detroit-based Ally Financial, declined to comment.

New York-based Citigroup “will review the Justice’s order and will ensure that we meet the new requirements,” spokesman Mark Rodgers said in an e-mail.

Foreclosure Review

“Citi
has been continuously reviewing its foreclosure processes with respect
to its U.S. mortgage portfolios,” Rodgers said. “Last year, we took a
series of steps to strengthen our processes and added additional
resources to ensure foreclosures were being processed correctly.”

Diane Henry,
a spokeswoman for Pasadena, California-based OneWest, declined to
comment. OneWest was formed in the aftermath of IndyMac Bancorp’s
failure.

Jason Menke,
a spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, said in an e-mail:
“We recognize and respect the need to ensure we always comply with
respective state laws. With our outside counsel, we intend to comply
with the New Jersey court’s order and demonstrate why the foreclosures
scheduled in New Jersey should move forward.”

U.S. bank regulators investigating foreclosure problems could impose fines or seek criminal penalties as soon as January, said Julie L. Williams, chief counsel of the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, said at a congressional hearing Dec. 2.

The
order is In the Matter of Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Pleading and
Document Irregularities, Administrative Order 01-2010.

To contact the reporters on this story: David Voreacos in Newark, New Jersey, at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net; Jody Shenn in New York at jshenn@bloomberg.net.

Order with supporting docs below...

4closureFraud.org

Order to Show Cause Issued by Judge Mary Jacobson - Residential Mortgage Foreclosures - Robosigning

Order to Show Cause Issued by Judge Mary Jacobson - Residential Mortgage Foreclosures - Robosigning

Administrative
Order Directing Submission of Information from Residential Mortgage
Foreclosure Plaintiffs Concerning Their Document Execution Practices to a
Special Master

Administrative Order Directing Submission of Information From Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Plaintiffs C... Notice and Order - Emergent Amendments to Rules 1:5-6, 4:64-1, and 4:64-2 - Residential Mortgage Foreclosures

Notice and Order - Emergent Amendments to Rules 1 5-6, 4 64-1, And 4 64-2 - Residential Mortgage Foreclosures

As much as a whole bunch of bank executives and securitization industry types have given Congressional testimony in which they maintained that they were duly concerned about “technical” errors like robo signing and would clean up their act, it appears that follow-through has been less than stellar.

New York State responded relatively promptly and imposed new requirments. On October 20, it issued a new rule requiring attorneys in foreclosure actions to certify that they have taken reasonable steps to verify the accuracy of documents they submit to the court. Although that might sound a tad redundant (aren’t they supposed to be doing that now?), the preamble to the new requirement discussed some of the practices that were cause for concern:

N.B.: During and after August 2010, numerous and widespread insufficiencies in foreclosure filings in various courts around the nation were reported by major mortgage lenders and other authorities. These insufficiencies include: failure of plaintiffs and their counsel to review documents and files to establish standing and other foreclosure requisites; filing of notarized affidavits which falsely attest to such review and to other critical facts in the foreclosure process; and “robosignature” of documents by parties and counsel. The wrongful filing and prosecution of foreclosure proceedings which are discovered to suffer from these defects may be cause for disciplinary and other sanctions upon participating counsel.

Today, StopForeclosure.com published that a single judge, Peter Cohalan, had denied 127 foreclosures under this new provision. Although the site did not offer any commentary, it appeared to regard this development as positive.

I see it as the reverse. Despite some jurisdictions taking a tougher stand and banks piously saying that they had cleaned up their “procedural” problems, it appears relatively little has changed on the ground. Rather than file the required certifications, the lawyers on these cases apparently figured they’d proceed as usual, which puts the onus on the judge to enforce. Or perhaps they are simply playing the odds, and assuming this issue will come up only on contested foreclosures, and those are few enough in number that the cost of delays in those cases is more than offset by the savings on the ones that are rubber stamped by the court.

ForeclosureFraud gives another New York sighting of a failure to provide the needed certification, this time before the famously tart Judge Schack. The bank lawyer’s explanation that it was his client’s, meaning Citigroup’s fault, did not go over very well:

In this foreclosure action, plaintiff, CITMORTGAGE, INC. (CITI), moved for summary judgment and an order of reference for the premises located at 38 Norwood Avenue, Brooklyn, New York (Block 3905, Lot 28, County of Kings). On October 25, 2010, the case was on my motion calendar for oral arguments. The matter was adjourned, pursuant to a short form order, on consent to today. Plaintiff CITI’s counsel agreed to file the affirmation required by the Chief Administrative Judge for foreclosure cases, as per the October 20, 2010 Administrative Order. Plaintiff’s counsel informed the Court, today, that he did not have the affirmation because CITI did not have in place, prior to November 8, 2010, procedures to comply with the Administrative Order of Chief Administrative Judge Ann T. Pfau. The Court does not work for CITI and cannot wait for CITI, a multi-billion dollar financial behemoth to get its “act” together. [*2]

Therefore, to prevent the waste of judicial resources, the instant foreclosure action is dismissed without prejudice.

While New York is providing a window on whether foreclosure mills are really changing behavior, sightings in other jurisdictions suggest not as much as bank PR would lead one to believe. For instance, in Florida, Default Law Group filed a “Motion to Ratify Summary Judgment“, which evidently is novel from a procedural standpoint, and included an argument that the previous affidavit was not a fraud on the court. But the law firm then canceled the hearing on that motion (maybe they realized it might not be too smart to have the judge turn down the motion, since it might be construed to be a ruling on the matter of the affidavits being an abuse). Another judge also questioned the validity of “ratifying” a motion for summary judgment. (Note that Florida plans to raise the summary judgment bar as of January 3 by requiring plaintiffs in foreclosures to attach copies of payment records to summary judgment filings).

Admittedly, we are only in the early stages of the post robo signing adaptation by banks and servicers, so the situation bears monitoring.

This testimony before the House Judiciary Committee by Thomas Cox, the attorney who brought GMACs’ robo signing to national attention, explains why these “procedural” matters are crucial:

bench craft company scam

Apple Products Review

torsdag 23 december 2010

bank foreclosure

KABOOM! BofA, GMAC, Chase, Wells, Citi, Onewest Face N.J. Foreclosure Freeze

4closureFraud.org

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