"Inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious"

A judge in New York has wiped out a $525k mortgage after OneWest bankers misled the court while trying to secure foreclosure.

• [Anonymous]

  Well it’s about time. I hope the higher courts not only uphold this judge’s decision but find a way to put these animals out of business for good.

• [insaneeddie]

  Is anyone surprised that, per the article, the bank that was being impossible to negotiate with, and only interested in squeezing value out of their assets without regard to the humans involved, had been purchased by a private equity firm?

• [Siouxsie Law]

  It will be interesting to see what happens on appeal.
  @IronEdithKidd — this is in state court, not federal, so there are no Bush appointees involved.

  I blogged about this here http://bit.ly/5wGx9C.

• [elisd]

  I love how when judges get angry they reach for their thesaurus.

  • [Wooly Mammoth]

    Well, those aren’t actually synonyms. In plainer words he would have said “unfair, unreasonable, troublesome and worthy of contempt”.

• [Kevin Kenny]

  I’m afraid that I can’t gloat, no matter what ill treatment the couple suffered at the hands of OneWest.

  A charity that I’ve found sufficiently worthy that I’ve given it a fair amount of my time and treasure over the years found its operating accounts wiped out nearly overnight in the fall of Lehman. (They were not investing exclusively in Lehman, but rather with Lehman; Lehman was holding their securities in trust.)

  Every time that a debt is wiped out like this, some creditor suffers as well; and it’s likely not to be just some rich banker.

  Schadenfreude is unbecoming.

  • [mdh]

    It’s not schadenfreude to laugh out loud when a profiteer gets sanctioned for lying to a judge. Oh, wait, maybe it is.

    Either way, your friends weren’t getting their money back, so let us enjoy the justice on display here. It’s rare, and heartening.

• [gollux]

  Well, there’s one private equity firm getting a minor tap up side the head.

  And you can see where people like the neighbor on the end of my street went wrong. You buy a $180,000 house, but dumbly take out a $240,000 mortgage on it because you’re intending to renovate it to flip for $300,000. The econolypse hits, your combined incomes are just making the current payments, the market to sell the house no longer exists and your rate adjusts.

  You now cannot afford to pay it off and foreclosure being invented by Scrooge himself demands that all principal, interest, baloon payment and fees you would have been liable for are instantly demanded. Now you start seeing the true cost of taking out that mortgage, it cost you $495,000, not the $250,000 that firmly affixed itself in your mind when you were being told what a grand deal you were getting and if you didn’t hurry up and buy now instead of taking two weeks to really consider the costs, that ten other people were just waiting to take the buy of the century off from under you.

  If you had taken the time to stuff all the figures into an amortization table, you would have realized that you don’t have enough combined capital, earning power, or possibly, health to pay off A HALF A MILLION dollars. Of course the mythical quick flip put in your mind that you wouldn’t be the poor fool paying it off, but the buyer (sucker) you would turn it over to.

  PSYCHE!!! Sorry Sucker!

• [jessemoya]

  Boooo for tricking me into visiting foxnews.com.

  Yaaay for punitive rulings against banks!

  …but I would have really liked to hear what kind of behavior was so “inequitable, unconscionable, vexatious and opprobrious.” From this article it doesn’t sound like the bank did anything wrong at all (not that that sounds plausible to me!).

  • [IronEdithKidd]

    In a legal sense, everything the bank did to obfuscate the truth qualifies for the rather loaded adjectives the judge used to describe the bank. Given the details of the ruling, this should hold up under circuit court appeal so long as the circuit isn’t loaded with Bush appointees.

    The long and the short of it is that banks would much rather foreclose on you than modify your mortgage in any way. They lose money either way, but they apparently hate us (because return on investment is long-term) and want to punish us for requiring the services for which they were granted incorporation by the government.

• [Phikus]

  Ok, Faux news picked this up from the NY Post? Have we stooped so low as to consider this credible?

• [Clifton]

  It appears that a copy of the Judge’s actual ruling is here: http://livinglies.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/ny-judges-rock-indymac-bank-f-s-b-v-yano-horoski/.

  Assuming this is correct, the judge noted among other points that Plaintiff (the bank) had repeatedly failed to show up to hearings, had claimed under oath that the defendant had willfully defaulted on a modified agreement which – on cross-examination – they had to admit had not been sent to her until after the default date, had refused to accept any alteration to the payment schedule, provided wildly conflicting statements of the actual principal amount. and finally was unable to explain what over $80K of the amount they were demanding from the defendant was based on.

  Sounds like pretty egregiously bad behavior.