Foreclosure Mills Begin Filing Motions To Withdraw Previously Filed Court Documents Signed By Loan Servicers' "Affidavit Slaves"

Mother Jones reports:

• Christopher Immel, an attorney for Ice Legal, a Florida foreclosure defense firm, said each and every foreclosure that relied on an affidavit signed by GMAC's [Jeffrey] Stephan is shrouded in doubt.(1) "People who lost their homes to evidence like that did have their homes taken wrongly," he says. Indeed, Immel tells Mother Jones that one major Florida foreclosure law firm, Florida Default Law Group, has already begun withdrawing affidavits signed by Stephan knowing that they're faulty and ripe for challenging.

• Immel adds that the effects of GMAC's decision to revisit foreclosures involving tainted legal documents could ripple throughout the housing industry. For instance, in May, another Ice Legal attorney took the deposition of Chase's [Beth] Cottrell, whose firm is a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase. In that deposition, Cottrell similarly conceded that she didn't have the "personal knowledge" required to sign the foreclosure documents that crossed her desk.(2)

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• [O]ne judge in central Florida told Mother Jones that, in the past week, she's seen attorneys representing several other big banks file what she called "mysterious" motions to proactively withdraw foreclosure affidavits. The firms say the affidavits "may not have been properly verified"—the same problem with the documents at the heart of GMAC's headaches.

• Having never seen a spate of withdrawals like this before, the judge, Pasco County's Lynn Tepper, questioned whether other banks might be hoping to avoid the kind of public scrutiny now on GMAC by quietly clearing up conflicts with robo-signed documents. Tepper called the motions "unbelievable," and said she might seek to vacate foreclosures—instead of merely delaying them—where banks try to swap out bogus documents for new ones.

For the story, see A Crack In Wall Street's Foreclosure Pipeline?

(1) Reportedly, in a June deposition, Stephan said his outfit handled 6,000 to 8,000 of these documents each month. Yet under questioning, Stephan all but admitted, under oath, that he didn't really read those crucial documents or know what they precisely said [...].

(2) For more on Cottrell, see Financial Times: Staff says bank foreclosures went unchecked:

• In one case signed off on by Ms Cottrell, two separate promissory notes were presented as originals, even though they contained different clauses and monthly payments. “They are clearly two different notes,” said Chris Immel, one of the lawyers. “That is not what I’d considered a technicality.”