Q. Would Litton have reached out to — I’m going to
13 call it MERS in place of Mortgage Electronic
14 Registration Systems. Would Litton have reached out to
15 MERS to execute this assignment?
16 A. Actually, Marti Noriega and Denise Bailey are
17 employed by Litton Loan Servicing. They have authority
18 to sign on behalf of MERS.
19 Q. Does either of those parties have authority to
20 sign on behalf of Accredited Home Lenders?
21 A. No, not to my knowledge.
22 Q. Do you know if Accredited Home Lenders was still
23 in place on the date that this assignment of mortgage
24 was executed?
THE WITNESS: I’m not certain of Accredited
2 Home Lenders’ status at this time.
3 BY MR. KORTE:
4 Q. As of April of 2009, are you aware if Accredited
5 Home Lenders was in bankruptcy?
6 A. I don’t know what their status was.
7 Q. Are there any other assignments of mortgage other
8 than this one as Composite Exhibit C that you’re aware
9 of?
10 A. No.
<SNIP>
Q. Well, is this Allonge a copy of the Allonge; or
3 is this the original Allonge copied with the correct
4 endorsement?
5 A. The only way I could verify that is to see the
6 actual, original note which is on file with the court.
7 Q. Do you know why the Allonges are different from
8 the one that was filed with the complaint and the one
9 that was filed with the court several months later?
10 A. No, I do not.
Two of my biggest concerns about the mortgage mess involve the conduct of lawyers at every stage, from creating the toxic securities to foreclosing on homes, and that so far the major players haven’t been held accountable for their actions in creating the crisis. Both concerns are neatly encapsulated by an enforcement action taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of last week.
On Friday, the SEC announced it is taking administrative action against David M. Tamman, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, a major international law firm. (Or at least, he was a partner: His page on the firm’s website has been removed.) The SEC is going after Tamman because it says he falsified a document that described securities he helped a client sell. That is, when the SEC asked Tamman for copies, it says he altered the real document and gave the SEC the fake.
While that conduct is egregious — and kudos to the SEC for going after him — it’s not that different than the ways many, many lawyers have behaved throughout this documentation debacle. For example, attorneys for multiple banks have been giving courts fraudulent documents in order to speed foreclosures, in many cases “robo-signing” the documents themselves. And consider the magnitude of the carelessness — it seems at least like malpractice to me — employed by the big firms involved in the securitization deals. How Did Thousands of Lawyers Miss the Problems?
TheIbanez decision in Massachusetts exposed the fact that the standard securitization deal violated a century of Massachusetts real estate law, and recently filed lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Bank of America (BAC) hint at how far astray the big law firms went. And not just one firm — the scale of the problems alleged in those cases suggest the problem was systemic.
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