Multnomah County is suing a rogue’s gallery of the largest mortgage players including B of A, Wells Fargo, Oregon’s Bank of the Cascades, Chase, Citi, and West Coast Bank for nearly forty million dollars.
The focus of the lawsuit The suit focuses on the mortgage-backed securities system that nearly wrecked the lives of families across Oregon in the later part of the last decade. In essence, the County is going after Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS., the property records system that enabled the rapid, complex transactions involving these bundled mortgages, and the banks that cut
The county is arguing that MERS wrecked the public property records system while simultaneously helping mortgage lenders evade transaction fees. Consequently, Multnomah County is suing MERS and 18 co-defendants for misrepresentation, negligence and unjust enrichment, alleging that MERS was fraudulently listed as the lender in a flood of transactions that littered the county’s public records with false records.” Multnomah county is also seeking three-fold repayment of multiple $30 transaction fees avoided through the use of MERS.
The original post is titled Multnomah County Suing Mortgage Monster , and it came from Oregon Bankruptcy Lawyer | Portland, Salem, and Vancouver, Wa .

Oregon Bankruptcy Lawyer
(posted 16 hours 57 min ago)

  Before filing your bankruptcy case, it is important to decide if bankruptcy is your best option. Depending on the specifics of your financial problems, we will gather and discuss as many of the facts in your case. We will want to know all aspects of your financial situation and what your desired outcomes are. [...]

(posted 1 day 11 hours ago)

On October 11 & 12, the University of Illinois College of Law will host the 12th annual Midwestern Law & Economics Association conference. The event consists of law professors and economists presenting papers with varying degrees of law-and-economics content, ranging from empirical analyses and formal economic modeling to legal philosophy and doctrinal papers infused with economic thinking. Paper submissions are due by August 1 and should be submitted to me at rlawless-at-illinois-dot-edu. More information can be found here.

Credit Slips
(posted 1 day 13 hours ago)

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week.

BankThink
(posted 1 day 15 hours ago)

This week on The Broke and the Beautiful, Greek soccer club AEK Athens is readying for bankruptcy. Also, Lou Pearlman’s bankruptcy case is coming to a close, and Kerry Katona is back on TV.

WSJ.com: Bankruptcy Beat
(posted 1 day 16 hours ago)

The Oreck family is rallying to take back their namesake vacuum-cleaner company from private equity owners in a deal valued at $22 million—a price that founder David Oreck hints is cheaper than what he sold the business for a decade ago.
Oreck, 89, has never stately publicly how much he profited from the 2003 sale of his company. But while his three sons lead the charge to buy the company’s 96 retail stores and 250-worker manufacturing plant in Tennessee out of bankruptcy, Oreck pointed out that the value of the business has certainly fallen in recent years.
“It obvious that it’s worth less today,” he said. “When I sold the company, it was prosperous, [its profit] was growing and it had virtually no debt, so it was a very healthy company.”
Asked whether his family would be buying it back at a discount, he replied: “It’s not too hard to put that together.”
Oreck Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on May 6, saying that the business has struggled against competitors and that sales have declined since 2010. The company has changed hands since the Oreck family sold it in 2003, and it’s now controlled by Black Diamond Commercial Finance LLC.
On Thursday, Oreck executives asked a bankruptcy judge to designate the family’s offer at the lead bid at a July 8 auction, according to papers filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Nashville, Tenn. Under the proposed sale timeline, other buyers would have until June 28 to put in rival bids.

WSJ.com: Bankruptcy Beat
(posted 1 day 18 hours ago)

Foolishness And Fraud Not Interchangeable In BankruptcyA Michigan man may face more than 20 years in federal prison after pleading guilty recently to charges related to money laundering and bankruptcy fraud.  Adrian Hassan Tageddine, 42, of Dearborn Heights, admitted to authorities he hid assets including cash and luxury vehicles when he filed for bankruptcy in 1999. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents [...]

AllmandLaw
(posted 1 day 19 hours ago)

The Chairman/CEO split issue is a sideshow. No one has considered the troubling implications of a large, crazy, lucky bet the London Whale made the year before his infamous money-losing trades.

BankThink
(posted 1 day 19 hours ago)

Weil Complex Commercial Litigation associate Eleanor Gilbane is author of the article “Investing in an Appeal,” published in the May 2013 issue of the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal.
The article focuses on appeals of confirmation orders and discusses the challenges facing appellants given the sizable bond requirement necessary to secure a stay and the risk of equitable mootness in the absence of a stay. Specifically, it discusses the appeal of the Adelphia confirmation years ago (Weil represented the appellants in that case) and compares it to the appeal of the Tribune confirmation order late last year.  It recommends that given these challenges, objectors to the confirmation order might be better served by negotiations and a settlement before the order is entered.
Please click here to read the full article.

(posted 1 day 19 hours ago)

The return to profitability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not a reason to preserve them as part of a future housing finance system.

BankThink
(posted 1 day 20 hours ago)