Mass Defection of Top Financial Services Attorneys at K&L Gates. A total of 26 top attorneys – including Laurence Platt, Phillip Schulman, Steven Kaplan, Melanie Brody and Jonathan Jaffe – have jumped ship from the K&L Gates law firm in Washington, DC, to the rival Beltway law shop of Mayer Brown. Their new Consumer Financial Services Group will advise leading financial services companies – including banks, investment banks, private equity funds, hedge funds, mortgage companies, marketplace lenders, emerging payment companies and start-ups –as well as various types of participants in the consumer credit and real estate finance arenas. Their specialized focus will include counseling clients on federal and state laws governing the making, servicing, purchase and sale of residential mortgage loans and the ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private companies, according to a recent Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals case that dismissed an argument stating that the mortgage giants are federal instrumentalities as it relates to them being liable under the False Claims Act. Now some say this ruling may influence and stir up reaction about a case in Delaware involving GSE shareholders who argue that the Treasury sweep of the GSEs’ profits was illegal. In the United States ex rel. Adams v. Aurora Loan Services, Inc., et al., a whistleblower case, James Adams, on behalf of the government, named 16 banks, lenders and servicers as defendants in a FCA breach of representations-and-warranties lawsuit. It was alleged...

FHFA Ramps Up HARP Social Media Efforts. The Federal Housing Finance Agency kicked off a new social media campaign in late February, #HARPNow, to let more than 367,600 homeowners across the country know about the Home Affordable Refinance Program before it expires on Dec. 31, 2016. FHFA will use Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to reach homeowners in the 10 states with the greatest concentration of HARP-eligible borrowers. Fannie Names Winner of Second NPL Community Impact Pool. Fannie Mae announced that New Jersey Community Capital is the winning bidder of the company’s second Community Impact Pool of non-performing loans. This pool of loans was structured to attract diverse participation from non-profits, smaller investors and minority- and women-owned businesses. The transaction...

The U.S. Department of Justice will reportedly decide within the next few months whether or not to bring the hammer down on Moody’s Corp. for allegedly overstating its ratings on MBS transactions in the run-up to the financial crisis, Bloomberg reported last week, citing “people familiar with the matter.” According to the news account, the Justice Department is scrutinizing credit ratings that Moody’s assigned during the housing boom and trying to determine if the firm massaged its criteria to earn business from Wall Street banks that were bundling residential mortgages into securities. A proposed settlement has apparently been...[Includes one data table]

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed an argument in a whistleblower case, ruling that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not “federal instruments” for the purposes of the False Claims Act, a federal statute that’s been used aggressively against FHA lenders. The FCA imposes liability on persons that defraud government programs and was originally enacted to penalize private parties that profited illegally in selling supplies to the U.S. Army during the Civil War. In the case of United States ex rel. Adams v. Aurora Loan Services, Inc., et al., the government argued...

One of the companies that purchased a large number of distressed homes from Fannie Mae following the housing crisis was the focus of a recent New York Times piece highlighting the problems brought on by investor-purchased homes that still linger today. Harbour Portfolio Advisors of Dallas is an investment firm that purchased thousands of single-family homes from Fannie in states like Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, by way of a pool sales program that existed from 2010 to 2014. The article accused the firm of targeting and taking advantage of low-income buyers who don’t know what they’re getting themselves into once agreeing to buy a fixer-upper home from Harbour. The investment firm bought...

Some of the most well-known names in mortgage lending and servicing continue to deal with a variety of regulatory crackdowns and judicial disputes, some of which stem from the 2008 mortgage market collapse. In Massachusetts, HSBC has agreed to pay $4.1 million to resolve allegations that it violated state consumer protection laws by receiving commissions and other kickbacks from insurer Assurant Inc. relating to force-placed insurance policies that it procured for struggling homeowners in the state. Under the terms of the settlement, HSBC will provide...

The California Supreme Court late last week issued a ruling in a case where a borrower challenged the foreclosure of a loan that was included in a non-agency MBS issued in 2007. The court allowed the borrower’s claims to proceed, which could prompt a significant increase in foreclosure-related litigation for California mortgages in non-agency MBS. An opinion authored by Kathryn Werdegar, an associate justice of the California Supreme Court, stresses that the court’s ruling in Yvanova v. New Century Mortgage is narrow. “We hold only that a borrower who has suffered a non-judicial foreclosure does not lack standing to sue for wrongful foreclosure based on an allegedly void assignment merely because he or she was in default on the loan and was not a party to the challenged assignment,” Werdegar said. The ruling left...

An appeals court in Massachusetts recently ruled in favor of a borrower in a case involving the determination of the borrower’s ability to repay a balloon mortgage, setting a concerning precedent, according to industry lawyers. Moronta v. Nationstar Mortgage involves a refinance originated by Fremont Investment & Loan in January 2007 for a borrower in Quincy, MA. The refi included a first-lien 3/1 adjustable-rate mortgage that amortized over 50 years with a ...

Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized its “no-action” policy towards market innovators that develop new financial services products, adopting its proposal largely unchanged. But industry experts think the new policy is not only useless but actually counterproductive in that it will likely discourage lenders from developing new loan products in an evolving mortgage market – not foster more innovation. This new policy – created under the CFPB’s Project Catalyst – “is designed to improve access to consumer financial products and services that promise substantial consumer benefits,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “We want to foster a consumer financial marketplace where companies develop safe, innovative products and approaches that can help make people’s lives better.” Under the policy, bureau staff would issue...