Even after the massive proof since 2010

H/t Deontos

Jeffrey Stephan was a GMAC Mortgage employee who signed summary judgment affidavits on behalf of GMAC in foreclosure proceedings instituted in Maine. The notarization on the summary judgment documents falsely stated that Stephan personally appeared and swore before the notary, when he did not. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maine certified the following question of state law to the Maine Supreme Court: “Is Maine’s common law judicial proceedings privilege an available defense to both legal and equitable claims brought under the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act based upon statements made in court filings of affidavits and certifications in state judicial foreclosure proceedings?” The Supreme Court declined to answer the certified question, where (1) if the Court answered the question in the affirmative, then the claim would be immediately and summarily dismissed even though the facts may have established that the privilege was not available to the defendant under any circumstances; and (2) if the Court answered the question in the negative, it would render a broad pronouncement of law that would have no application to this case if a threshold issue produced the same result – namely, that the judicial proceedings privilege was simply unavailable on these particular facts.

MAINE SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT Reporter of Decisions

Decision: 2012 ME 131
Docket: Fed-11-295
Argued: February 16, 2012
Decided: November 29, 2012

Panel: ALEXANDER, LEVY, SILVER, MEAD, GORMAN, and JABAR, JJ.

NICOLLE BRADBURY et al.

v.

GMAC MORTGAGE, LLC

MEAD, J.

EXCERPT:

[¶3] The court also included a recitation of facts2 within its certification that “[t]he Law Court may consider as true.” The factual recitation included the following statement: “[T]he notarization on the [summary judgment] documents falsely stated that Stephan3 personally appeared and swore before the notary, when he did not.”

[¶4] We conclude that the interplay between (1) the four corners of the certified question, (2) the representation that the lawsuit will be dismissed in its entirety if we answer the question in the affirmative, and (3) the fact of the defective notarization of the affidavits requires us to respectfully decline to answer the certified question.

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.

Attorney Tom Cox is a hero and deserves all the rewards coming to him.

NYT-

In 1989, Tom Cox, a lawyer for a Maine bank at the time, wrote the book on mortgage foreclosures (“Maine Real Estate Foreclosure Procedures for Lenders and Workout Officers”), detailing the most effective legal methods for seizing people’s homes.

After 30 years of that, he retired and in 2008, during the Great Recession, he experienced a crisis of conscience and switched sides to work pro bono for people whose homes were being foreclosed on by banks.

 In this case it took a banker to catch a banker. Mr. Cox very quickly realized that GMAC, the mortgage company he was suing in court to save Nicolle Bradbury’s $75,000 house, was mass-producing flawed paperwork to seize people’s homes illegally. This set off what would become known as the robo-mortgage scandal, leading to a $25 billion settlement that forced the nation’s largest banks to halt foreclosures.

[NEW YORK TIMES]

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A Denmark woman whose case touched off a national uproar over foreclosures with faulty paperwork may finally lose her home.

KJOnline-

By a 5-1 decision released this morning, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court ruling that allowed loan servicer GMAC Mortgage, despite admittedly flawed practices involved in affadavit signing, to foreclose upon a home in Denmark purchased in 2003 by Nicolle M. Bradbury.

[KJONLINE]

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.

Portland Press Herald-

PORTLAND – The “robo-signing” foreclosure case of a Denmark woman represents such a serious attack on the integrity of the state’s judicial system that an investigation of the mortgage servicer’s practices is warranted, the woman’s lawyer argued before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday.

Nicolle Bradbury’s attorney, Thomas Cox, also said a lower court erred when it failed to find GMAC Mortgage in contempt because one of its employees signed a sworn document in support of foreclosure on her home without reviewing the relevant records. Cox, who discovered the flawed process, argued that it was part of a pattern and that the trial court should have considered remedial or punitive action against GMAC.

Cox said such affidavits affect all of the 1,152 foreclosure actions brought in Maine by GMAC over the past six years. He said GMAC was sanctioned in Florida for the same problems in 2006, but failed to reform its practices.

[PORTLAND PRESS]

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.

The Morning Sentinel-

A landmark legal case that spotlighted mishandled foreclosures by some of the country’s major lenders is likely to come before Maine’s highest court in September.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court is expected to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling involving the mortgage servicer GMAC and its foreclosure practices.

Last September, a Maine District Court judge found that a GMAC official had signed a sworn statement supporting the foreclosure of a home owned by Nicolle Bradbury of Denmark, who had lost her job and stopped making mortgage payments. The official, however, hadn’t actually reviewed Bradbury’s foreclosure documents before signing.

Continue reading [THE MORNING SENTINEL]

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.

From a Maine House, a National Foreclosure Freeze

By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: October 14, 2010

DENMARK, Me. — The house that set off the national furor over faulty foreclosures is blue-gray and weathered. The porch is piled with furniture and knickknacks awaiting the next yard sale. In the driveway is a busted pickup truck. No one who lives there is going anywhere anytime soon.

Nicolle Bradbury bought this house seven years ago for $75,000, a major step up from the trailer she had been living in with her family. But she lost her job and the $474 monthly mortgage payment became difficult, then impossible.

It should have been a routine foreclosure, with Mrs. Bradbury joining the anonymous millions quietly dispossessed since the recession began. But she was savvy enough to contact a nonprofit group, Pine Tree Legal Assistance, where for once in her 38 years, she caught a break.

Her file was pulled, more or less at random, by Thomas A. Cox, a retired lawyer who volunteers at Pine Tree. He happened to know something about foreclosures because when he worked for a bank he did them all the time. Twenty years later, he had switched sides and, he says, was trying to make amends.

Suddenly, there is a frenzy over foreclosures. Every attorney general in the country is participating in an investigation into the flawed paperwork and questionable methods behind many of them. A Senate hearing is scheduled, and federal inquiries have begun. The housing market, which runs on foreclosure sales, is in turmoil. Bank stocks fell on Thursday as analysts tried to gauge the impact on lenders’ bottom lines.

All of this is largely because Mr. Cox realized almost immediately that Mrs. Bradbury’s foreclosure file did not look right. The documents from the lender, GMAC Mortgage, were approved by an employee whose title was “limited signing officer,” an indication to the lawyer that his knowledge of the case was effectively nonexistent.

Mr. Cox eventually won the right to depose the employee, who casually acknowledged that he had prepared 400 foreclosures a day for GMAC and that contrary to his sworn statements, they had not been reviewed by him or anyone else.

Continue reading…NYTIMES

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[ipaper docId=39481026 access_key=key-2jwfcmqf1p2gjyt4fw7o height=600 width=600 /]

© 2010-19 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.

By Lynn E. Szymoniak, Esq. Ed., Fraud Digest (www.frauddigest.com) July 18, 2010

These are highlights from the deposition of Jeffrey B. Stephan, taken June 7, 2010, in a foreclosure case in Maine, Federal National Mortgage Association v. Nicole M. Bradbury, et al., Maine District Court, District Nine, Division of Northern Cumberland, Docket No. BRI-RE-09-65. The deposition was taken by Attorney Thomas Cox of Portland, Maine.

Jeffrey Stephan says his current title is team leader of the document execution team for GMAC. He estimates that he signs between 8,000 and 12,000 documents monthly. He supervises a team of 14 employees.

Mortgage Assignments and Affidavits in support of Summary Judgment signed by Stephan have been used by GMAC, FANNIE & FREDDIE in over 100,000 foreclosure cases.

“LPS” in the last line refers to Lender Processing Services in Jacksonville, Florida.

In a previous deposition, Stephan stated that the notaries who notarize his signature are often not actually present in the room with him when he signs documents.

Despite all of the mounting evidence and admissions, Jeffrey Stephan, Scott Anderson, Bryan Bly, Linda Green, Erica Johnson-Seck, Christina Trowbridge and the other “bank officers” employed by the companies serving the securitized
mortgage-backed trust industry will be back at their desks Monday morning, pens (or rubber stamps) in hand.

Page 16-17, Lines 17-25, 2-11

Q: What training have you received?

A: I received side-by-side training from another team leader to instruct me on how to review the documents when they are received from my staff.

Q: Who was that person?

A: That person, at the time, I believe, was a gentleman named Kenneth Ugwuadu. U-G-W-U-A-D-U. He is no longer with GMAC.

Q: How long did that training last?

A: Three days.

Q: Were there any written or printed training materials or manuals used as apart of that training?

A: No.

Page 20, Lines 19-24:

Q.: In your capacity as the team leader for the document execution team, do you have any role in the foreclosure process, other than the signing of documents?

A: No.

Page 54, Lines 12-25:

Q: When you sign a summary judgment affidavit, do you check to see if all of the exhibits are attached to it?

A: No.

Q. Does anybody in your department check to see if all the exhibits are attached to it at the time that it is presented to you for your signature?

A: No.

Q: When you sign a summary judgment affidavit, do you inspect any exhibits attached to it?

A: No.

Page 62-63, Lines 23-25, 2-6:

Q: Is it fair to say when you sign a summary judgment affidavit, you don’t know what information it contains, other than the figures that are set forth within it?

A: Other than the borrower’s name, and if I have signing authority for that entity, that is correct.

Page 69, Lines 2-20:

Q: Mr. Stephan, referring you again to the bottom line on Page 1 of Exhibit 1, it states: I have under my custody and control, the records relating to the mortgage transaction referenced below.

It’s correct, is it not, that you did not have in your custody any records of GMAC at the time that you signed a summary judgment affidavit?

A: I have the electronic record. I do not have papers.

Q: You have access to a computer, is that what you mean?

A: Yes.
(objections omitted)

Page 45, Lines 2-11:

Q: Mr. Stephan, do you recall testifying in your Florida deposition in December with regard to your employees, and you said, quote, they do not go into the system and verify that the information is accurate?

A: That is correct.

Page 41, Line 19:

Q: Do your employees have any direct communication with outside counsel?

A: Yes, through the LPS System.

Please click on Fraud Digest’s logo to read more articles like this.

Here is the Deposition Below:

Via: 4closurefraud

[ipaper docId=33129394 access_key=key-2ml8jt9qwzgk3qgg0qr0 height=600 width=600 /]

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