About Me

We audit mortgages for violations of state and federal underwriting statutes. BCA aggregates class members for Class Action firms suing predatory lenders and those who have abused their power in the administration of federal subsidies meant to inure to the benefit of homeowners. The BankClassAction.com site is a data platform where homeowners can match themselves with Class Action Lawsuits by answering specific questions about their interaction with their lender while the Class Action firms post specific relevant information about their case and/or investigations. The homeowner can either "FLAG" themselves as a potential member of a particular (or multiple) cases -OR- request that the platform auto profile relevant cases. In either event the homeowner data is securely passed to the relevant law firms and this costs neither the homeowner nor the law firm a dime.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Class Action on Ice Resumes in the wake of the ibanez decision.

 great article from Bloomberg..

Massachusetts Foreclosure Class Action to Resume Manson v GMAC

A statewide class action in which Massachusetts homeowners accuse U.S. Bancorp and Ally Financial Inc. of faulty foreclosures will resume now that the state’s high court ruled in a similar case last week.
The litigation was on hold while the Supreme Judicial Court decided whether state law required foreclosures to be conducted by the mortgage owner. The high court ruled Jan. 7 in U.S. Bank v. Ibanez that an industry practice allowing post-foreclosure assignments violated state law.
“This is a statewide class action and it’s going to bring relief to all of the people who are dispossessed homeowners in many instances,” Kevin Costello, a lawyer for the borrowers, said in a telephone interview today. Costello today filed a motion to restart evidence gathering in the case.
Claims of wrongdoing by banks and loan servicers triggered a 50-state investigation last year into whether hundreds of thousands of foreclosures were properly documented as the housing market collapsed.
Unwinding of foreclosures may lead to loan workouts with homeowners or force originators to buy back loans that ended up in mortgage-backed securities.
Teri Charest, a U.S. Bancorp spokeswoman, didn’t have an immediate comment. The Minneapolis-based company was sued as overseer of a mortgage-backed trust.
Gina Proia, a spokeswoman for Detroit-based Ally Financial, didn’t have an immediate comment.
Halt RequestIn July, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns in Boston granted the defendants’ request to halt the class action until the high court ruled in Ibanez.  Banks and law firms had been conducting foreclosures in the state before mortgages were transferred to them under a 1995 “title standard” by the Real Estate Bar Association for Massachusetts, a group of closing attorneys, that condoned the practice.
“It was basically created by the real-estate bar without adequate foundation,” said Costello of Roddy Klein & Ryan in Boston. “It became an enabler for people who wanted to do business the way they wanted to do business.”
The homeowners in the class-action, or group, lawsuit said their foreclosures were also brought by the wrong party, often because of the process of securitization -- bundling mortgages into trusts that issue bonds.
‘Clearly Establishes’  The Ibanez ruling “pretty clearly establishes that our theory of the case is correct,” Costello said. “The securitization machinery didn’t allow for individualized treatment of these kinds of loans and so the sort of standard industry practice was foreclose first and assign later.”
The case has two classes of borrowers, he said: those whose foreclosures were started though not completed and those with completed foreclosures.
The homeowners sued Ally unit GMAC Mortgage and U.S. Bancorp unit U.S. Bank. Other defendants include EMC Mortgage, now owned by JPMorgan Chase & Co., and two foreclosure law firms, Harmon Law Offices PC in Newton and Ablitt Scofield PC in Woburn.  Lawrence Scofield of Ablitt Scofield said his firm worked on only one of the foreclosure cases involved and it didn’t concern a late mortgage assignment, as in Ibanez.“These are all naked allegations and as far as I know we followed standard, normal foreclosure practice,” he said.Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan, declined to comment.   Andrew Harmon of the Harmon firm didn’t immediately return a call for comment.
The case is Manson v. GMAC Mortgage LLC, 08-cv-12166, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).  To contact the reporter on this story: Thom Weidlich in Brooklyn, New York, federal court at tweidlich@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David E. Rovella at drovella@bloomberg.net.

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