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Please listen to the West Coast Foreclosure Show.  Attorney Charles Marshall interviews former FDIC team leader Eric Mains about his foreclosure battle and FOIA strategy.

By K.K. MacKinstry

Anyone who knows former FDIC Team Leader Eric Mains knows he is one tenacious ex-banker.  In eight years of litigation, every court he has approached for relief has stonewalled his efforts to discover who owns his mortgage loan.  Mains is still in his home despite Chase’s most recent Motion to Dismiss that was granted by the United States District Court based on Rooker-Feldman doctrine that shouldn’t have applied due to the fact neither the parties or subject matter of his federal complaint was covered in his State foreclosure action.

It is astonishing that Mains has not prevailed in his lawsuit against CitiBank and Chase.  In his lawsuits, he has variously provided evidence of the following:

– His Note was “endorsed” in blank and undated with stamp of one Cynthia Riley, a former WAMU employee laid off from her job at WAMU before his note was endorsed, and whose FL deposition in 2013 revealed she never worked at the SC facility his loan documents were sent to, never personally endorsed any notes herself, and her stamps were not located at the SC facility.

-Whistleblower Lynn Syzmoniak’s qui tam lawsuit revealed that one Jodi Sobotta (alleged “attorney in fact” for Chase who signed another of his Note assignments) was in fact a LPS employee in MN who alleged in the qui tam suit to have been involved in unauthorized robosigning and forgery at that facility. Christine Sauerer, notary on the assignment, filed an official notary card with MN which contains her signature, but it does not match her alleged signature on his assignment. Even more damningly, she supposedly notarized the assignment over 1 year before it was recorded in the county recorder’s office. This is an amazing feat as the assignment, ANY loan assignment, would have been sent to the local recorder’s office for recordation directly after execution as a normal course of business to ensure timely recording and priority- as any competent attorney could attest. This is direct evidence the assignment had been back dated as well as forged.

-While the above is incredible enough, it doesn’t end there. The above assignment was one of the assignments that was the subject of a $125 million 2013 multi-state consent judgment with LPS. LPS and its agents, which would have included the attorneys it contracted and retained to instigate the very foreclosures its forged assignments were used in, was required by the CJ to have reached out to consumers affected by their forgeries and remediated their forged assignments executed from 2008-2010, of which Mains was one. Mains foreclosure judgment occurred months after the signing of the CJ, and the foreclosure mill law firm in that case, Nelson & Frankenberger, never disclosed LPS as a material party in discovery, and never disclosed to the court the forgery activity it was aware of.  To this day, they have still proceeded to try multiple times to move forward with sheriffs sales on Mains property using the same forged documents, in violation of the CJ, and while the Indiana AG’s office remains mute.

Mains has appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States his 2017 federal appellate court ruling that their jurisdiction to hear his complaint was barred by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine.  Meanwhile, Mains has continued to seek information in his case, notably through a Freedom of Information Act request, in which he demanded that the Indiana Attorney General’s office provide information regarding the 2013 consent judgement with LPS/Black Knight, and their stated compliance with its terms, which is required to be documented in quarterly reports to the AG’s of all 50 states who were signatories to the settlement.

He requested copies of all the information relevant to the consent judgement, and he specifically requested copies of the all compliance reports the AG’s office held and was to have received from LPS/Black Knight. Mains wanted to know what LPS/Black Knight was doing to comply with the consent judgement to stop its stipulated to unauthorized signing of loan documents, the use of those documents, and most basically what their compliance activities consisted of. This is just common sense, as any Indiana consumer, homeowner, legislator, or attorney would expect to be apprised of the what, where, when, and how of LPS/Black Knight’s compliance with the CJ…. especially after paying the IN AG’s office $1.6 million to settle it violations!

After Mains sent his FOIA to the AG’s office he received a pathetically anemic response.  The AG ignored most of his request and were only willing to disclose 19 pages of documents. The 7 page CJ itself, and 12 supposed cover letters to the compliance reports and the original complaint.  That is it!!!!  Mains has indicated his suspicion that the compliance reports either don’t exist, or they fail to address the requirements of the consent judgements.

The IN AG has generally claimed that everything in relation to the settlement and information related to it is attorney work product or is somehow privileged/confidential.  This is patently ridiculous and violates the Indiana Public Records Act.  The various state AG’s offices are required to follow up on the consent judgement until January of 2018.  Mains wants to know what the state AG’s have done to protect consumers and ensure the compliance with the terms of the 2013 CJ, especially after taking millions of dollars of LPS money for that privilege. He encourages consumers and the media to do the same in each of their respective states given the danger that state AG’s are still knowingly and negligently allowing these fraudulent documents to be used in foreclosures in their states despite the 2013 CJ specifically prohibiting this conduct.

Look for Part II on Monday regarding how you can benefit from your own FOIAs, what you can do to help others, and why it matters.

Filed under: foreclosure | Tagged: attorney charles marshall, Citibank, Cynthia Riley, Eric mains, JPMorgan Chase, LPS Consent Judgement, LPS/Blacknight |