NY Times GRETCHEN MORGENSON: Looking for the Lenders’ Little Helpers
It is hard not to be dismayed by the fact that two years into our economic crisis so few perpetrators of financial misdeeds have been held accountable for their actions. And what of the giant institutions that helped finance these monumentally toxic loans, or arranged the securitizations that bundled the loans and sold them to investors? So far, they have argued, fairly successfully, that they operated independently of the original lenders. Therefore, they are not responsible for any questionable loans that were made.

But this argument is growing tougher to defend. Some legal experts point to a number of cases in which plaintiffs contend that firms involved in the securitization process, like trustees hired to oversee the pools of loans backing securities, worked so closely with the lenders that they should face liability as members of a joint venture. And these experts see a rising receptiveness to this argument by some courts.

“As we are unpeeling what was happening on Wall Street, we may see that Wall Street didn’t find the safety from litigation risk that it hoped to find in securitization,” said Kathleen Engel, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. “I think there is potential for liability if borrowers can engage in discovery to see exactly how much the sponsors were shaping the practices of the lenders.”

One example is a suit filed in Federal District Court in Atlanta, on behalf of the borrowers, Patricia and Ricardo Jordan. The Jordans are fighting a foreclosure on their home of 25 years that they say was a result of an abusive and predatory loan made by NovaStar Mortgage Inc. A lender that had been cited by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for improprieties, like widely hiring outside contractors as loan officers, NovaStar ran out of cash in 2007 and is no longer making loans.

Also named as a defendant in the case is the initial trustee of the securitization that contained the Jordans’ loan: JPMorgan Chase. In 2006, the bank transferred its trustee business to Bank of New York Mellon, which is also a defendant in the case. The Jordans are asking that all three defendants pay punitive damages.

“We contend that the trustee has direct liability on the theory that even though they were not sitting at the loan closing table, they were involved in the securitization and profited from it,” said Sarah E. Bolling, a lawyer in the Home Defense Program at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society who represents the Jordans. “The prospectus had been written before the loan was closed. If this loan was not going to be assigned to a trust, it would not have been made.”

IN their legal briefs, the trustees have made the traditional argument that their relationship with NovaStar was not a joint venture and that they are not responsible for any problems with the Jordans’ loan.

A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment on the case but said that because the bank was no longer the trustee, it was not directly involved in the litigation. A spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon also declined to comment.

A lawyer for NovaStar did not return calls seeking comment.

The facts surrounding the Jordans’ case are depressingly familiar. In 2004, interested in refinancing their adjustable-rate mortgage as a fixed-rate loan, they said they were promised by NovaStar that they would receive one. In actuality, their lawsuit says, they received a $124,000 loan with an initial interest rate of 10.45 percent that could rise as high as 17.45 percent over the life of the loan.

Mrs. Jordan, 66, said that she and her husband, who is disabled, provided NovaStar with full documentation of their pension, annuity and Social Security statements showing that their net monthly income was $2,697. That meant that the initial mortgage payment on the new loan — $1,215 — amounted to 45 percent of the Jordans’ monthly net income.

The Jordans were charged $5,934 when they took on the mortgage, almost 5 percent of the loan amount. The loan proceeds paid off the previous mortgage, $11,000 in debts and provided them with $9,616 in cash.

Neither of the Jordans knew the loan was adjustable until two years after the closing, according to the lawsuit. That was when they began getting notices of an interest-rate increase from Nova- Star. The monthly payment is now $1,385.

“I got duped,” Mrs. Jordan said. “They knew how much money we got each month. Next thing I know I couldn’t buy anything to eat and I couldn’t pay my other bills.”

All the defendants in the case have asked the judge to dismiss it. The Jordans are awaiting his ruling.

Perhaps the most famous case that linked a brokerage firm with a predatory lender was the one involving First Alliance, an aggressive lender that declared bankruptcy in 2000, and Lehman Brothers, its main financier.

More than 7,500 borrowers had successfully sued First Alliance for fraud, and in 2003 a jury found that Lehman, which had lent First Alliance roughly $500 million over the years to finance its lending, “substantially assisted” it in its fraudulent activities. Lehman was ordered to pay $5.1 million, or 10 percent of damages in the case, for its role.

Another case, from 2004, took up the issue of liability for abusive lending that went beyond a loan’s originator. That case, which involved Wells Fargo and a borrower named Michael L. Short, was settled after the court denied two motions to dismiss it.

That matter turned on the language in the securitization’s pooling and servicing agreement, which provides details not only on the types of loans in a pool but also on the relationships of various parties involved in it.

Diane Thompson, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, said that the meaning of the agreement was that “the trustee was a joint venture with the originator and was therefore responsible for everything that happened in that joint venture.”

Many such agreements, she said, create a joint venture by force of law. “Everybody I know that has tried this argument has had pretty good success. Absolutely we are going to see more of these cases.”

And let us not forget that late in the mortgage mania, Wall Street was no longer content simply to package these loans and sell them to investors. Eager for the profits generated by originating these loans, big firms bought subprime lenders to keep their securitization machinery humming. This could expose the firms to liability.

“I think something that hasn’t been explored much is the extent to which the financial services industry has exposure to litigation risk in securitizations,” Professor Engel said. “As the industry got faster and looser, Wall Street just stopped paying attention. And when you stop paying attention, you get in trouble.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/business/12gret.html?_r=1