Friday, October 01, 2010
Foreclosures Slow as Document Flaws Emerge….The foreclosure machinery that has forced millions of Americans out of their homes is beginning to seize up as some lenders and their lawyers are accused of cutting corners in their pursuit of rapid home repossessions.
Evictions are expected to slow sharply, housing analysts said, as state and national law enforcement officials shine a light on questionable foreclosure methods revealed by two of the country’s biggest home lenders in the last two weeks.
GMAC has acknowledged legal missteps in processing mortgages, and JPMorgan Chase has acknowledged the possibility of missteps, and both have suspended all foreclosures in the 23 states where they need a court’s approval. That’s 56,000 in the case of Chase alone; GMAC declined to provide a number.
Attorneys general in half a dozen states are demanding action or opening investigations. The Treasury Department said Thursday it was asking regulators to look into “these troubling developments.”
GMAC and Chase say that their lapses were technical and will soon be remedied with new filings. But defense lawyers are seizing on these revelations and say they will now work to have their cases thrown out.
GMAC, which is owned by Detroit-based Ally Financial Inc., did not identify the specific internal issue that prompted the moratorium in its statement, but it has been linked to lawsuits this year surrounding the alleged falsification of a key foreclosure document.
The Florida attorney general is investigating three law firms for allegedly providing fraudulent affidavits that identify who holds the original mortgage note in foreclosure cases. In Florida and in other states, this document allows lenders to bypass a costly trial and proceed with a foreclosure.
Two of the three firms being investigated — the Law Office of Marshall C. Watson and the Law Offices of David J. Stern PA — have represented GMAC in foreclosure proceedings. And the person who signed many of these allegedly false affidavits was an employee of GMAC.
GMAC’s initial disclosures prompted challenges or investigations from attorneys general in Iowa, Illinois, Colorado, Florida, California and North Carolina. The Treasury Department, which became the majority owner of GMAC after providing $17 billion in bailout money, has directed the lender to correct its procedures. U.S. Secret Service is the investigative arm of the U.S. Treasury Department.
The U.S.Secret Service received concurrent jurisdiction with Department of Justice law enforcement personnel to conduct any kind of investigation, civil or criminal, related to federally insured financial institutions (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the only two Fortune 500 companies that are not required to inform the public about any financial difficulties that they may be having. In the event that there was some sort of financial collapse within either of these companies, U.S. taxpayers could be held responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in outstanding debts.
A former investigation by the Justice Department and the SEC into the accounting practices at Freddie Mac revealed accounting errors in the amount of 4.5 to 4.7 billion dollars. Ongoing investigations by Congress, particular the House Finance Services subcommittee that oversees the activity of GSEs, will determine the future role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the secondary mortgage market that they dominate.
A ex-employee of the Law Offices of David J. Stern of Plantation has contacted me, private investigator Bill Warner, in response to the article I posted in 2009, that followed up on the Tampa Tribune article of April 2008, it appears that what I had claimed about “sewer service” by Provest LLC in Tampa Fl (working for the Stern law office) is just the tip of the iceberg.
It appears from this ex-employee of the Law Offices of David J. Stern of Plantation that Provest, the process service company in Tampa, also had an office in the same building as the Law Offices of David J. Stern in Plantation and that “sewer service’ was done all the time and if needed Provest would pre-date the service of summons to make it appear that you had already been served and allow Stern to put your foreclosure case on a “rocket docket’ to get the house up for sale on the Court House steps.
Then the sales girls in the Stern office (a lot of the associate attorneys at the Stern Law firm have real estate licenses) would contact outside buyers and inform them of the exact time and date of the “court house steps sale” and tell the outside buyers what the correct amount to bid that would be approved by the bank and the court, (this is ”bid rigging”).
An associate at the Law office of David J. Stern is attorney Vivien Leora Lurlene who also has a Real Estate Sales License in the State of Florida, I have no knowledge of her involvement in the ”bid rigging”or any other illegal activity at the Law Office of David J. Stern. These outside buyers contacted by the sales girls at the Stern Law office would resell these super low bargain houses purchaed on the Court House Steps for a profit and pay off the sales girls in the Stern Law office for the tip.
It appears that information from this ex-employee that the Law Offices of David J. Stern of Plantation told her to make up false documents for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae when they came around to check their Foreclosure files, she was also instructed to lie to the banks when they requested a chronology report which is the foreclosure time-line on a file, there appears to be Federal violations that would necessitate an FBI investigation and U.S. Secret Service investigation, the ex-employee is afraid to talk.
The federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refers to the placing into conservatorship of government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the U.S. Treasury in September 2008. It was one financial event among many in the ongoing subprime mortgage crisis.
Bill Warner Private Investigator, SEX, CRIME, CHEATERS & TERRORISM.
