An Investigation Of Deutsche Bank and United States Foreclosures
Home owners who pay their mortgages to Saxon Mortgage Services, Inc., received some help today in determining which bank actually holds their mortgage. Saxon Mortgage only acts as the mortgage servicer.
One home owner said “Instead of going after a company that has no control over your homes, try filing compliants to the BBB, FTC, OCC. Holder and owner of your loans which is Deutsche Bank not, and I repeat, NOT Saxon mortgage. Deutsche Bank may be hiding under Saxon Mortgage.”
The home owner, like many others, is frustrated with Saxon Mortgage HAMP modifications, or lack thereof. Although news reports and analysis of HAMP mortgage modifications claim Saxon Mortgage has modified more mortgages than any other firm Watchdog and consumer advocate organization Saxon Watch disputes the claim.
Deutsche Bank’s Alleged Illegal U.S. Foreclosure Practices
President Obama has announced programs to reduce or prevent foreclosures, but these will come too late for tens of thousands of Americans who are being forced from their homes by Deutsche Bank. From Boston to Honolulu, Deutsche Bank is America’s Foreclosure King. In Kansas City alone, Deutsche Bank is the largest owner of foreclosed properties, and is letting the city rot as it allows the properties to fall into disrepair and neglect.
Not content to foreclose on the existing properties in its portfolio, Deutsche Bank might be compounding the misery of homeowners – especially properties owned by minorites – by illegally buying up the notes of defaulting mortgagees. The problem is particularly acute for black and hispanic homeowners in Florida:
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(BOYNTON BEACH, FL) — A private forensic mortgage auditing firm is burning the business air waves today. Germany-based Deutsche Bank is the target.
MFI-Miami LLC says it is narrowing its multi-state investigation into illegal home foreclosures by focusing exclusively on Deutsche Bank.
“Deutsche Bank is named as the trustee on nearly 50 percent of the fraud investigations we have done in the past six months,” says Stephen Dibert, president of MFI-Miami, an 11-month-old firm he founded in West Palm Beach, FL.
Dibert maintains “Deutsche Bank retains law firms that aren’t interested in defending the legitimacy of their claim. Their purpose is to intimidate, obtain default judgments, and foreclose as fast as possible against homeowners who are uneducated about the legal foreclosure process.”
“They are turning the foreclosure process into the Wild West, and many of these foreclosures are plainly illegal.”
Miami foreclosure defense attorney Shaun Rice, of De Armas, Millich, & Rice says, :”I strongly believe that minorities have suffered disproportionately as a result precisely from banks like Deutsche Bank who often never had a legitimate claim to bring a foreclosure action in the first place.”
Adds Dibert: “Deutsche Bank is displacing minority homeowners at a methodical rate.”
But some homeowners are fighting back against the German financial giant, with a new organizational effort known as “Produce The Note” movement. In order to feed the securitization frenzy of investment banks such as Deutsche Bank, many mortgage originators had sloppy or non-existent paperwork practices, so now the trustee is unable to produce physical evidence that it actually owns the mortgage note. This has worked against Deutsche Bank in some notable instances:
“In a recent Supreme Court case in Saratoga, New York, Judge Thomas Nolan denied Deutsche Bank’s foreclosure action against a borrower because the Bank offered “no evidence that it took physical delivery of the note and mortgage before commencing this action.”
As recently as August 19, a Massachusetts bankruptcy court denied Deutsche Bank National Trust’s motion and ordered counsel to the debtor “to submit an application for compensation.”
Also in Ohio, a rash of foreclosure cases brought by mortgage investors were dismissed by Judges. According to court documents, Federal Judge Christopher Boyko dismissed 14 foreclosure cases filed by Deutsche Bank in 2007, ruling that “the plaintiff had failed to establish that they had a standing to bring the lawsuits.”
Of particular interest to investigators at Saxon Watch is Saxon Mortgage Services, owned by Morgan Stanley. Saxon Watch investigators determined that Deutsche Bank is indeed the owner of mortgages sold by Novastar Mortgage of Kansas City Missouri. In an article titled “Deutsche Bank, Novastar, and Saxon Mortgage Tie-in” the advocacy group determined the underwriters for the deals were Greenwich Capital Markets, Inc, Wachovia Capital Markets, LLC and Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc. They are the ones that purchased the certificates and sold them to investors to finance the loans.
Novastar Funding Trusts at Deutsche Bank are only one small part of Deutsche Bank’s involvement with subprime and the mortgage bubble. As stated in the article above Deutsche Bank is heavily invested in United States real estate and mortgages. Saxon Watch did not comment on alleged disparity between minority foreclosures and other foreclosures. “We do not ask about ethnicity when someone submits a complaint to Saxon Watch”, the group said.
This is an ongoing investigation and does not imply any wrongdoing by any parties mentioned in this article. Some parts of this article are submitted by home owners under a great amount of stress. Their opinions are their own. The views expressed by the owners and/or contributors of this site are based on experience in the lending and real estate industry, and in consumer advocacy, and should not be construed or interpreted as legal advice.
Updates on the MFI investigation of Deutsche Bank can be seen here
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December 8th, 2009 at 3:17 PM
I am one of the only 1% who have made it to actually receiving the legal papers. Not without much fight, I might add. Note: nobody elects to be a customer of Saxon Mortgage Services. Most end up with Saxon because their mortgage was either sold or aquired by Saxon in one way or another. If Saxon makes it their business to scarf up on all the subprime and disfunctional mortgage loans from other banks on the brink of closing, then no wonder they have such high numbers. One cannot measure the success rate of the HAMP program by counting the trials that were extended. You must count the actual finished, signed and notarized legal contracts that are produced after the trial. Overall, Saxon stands to gain an average of $3000. per family that is thrust into the trial period program, regardless of whether they actually complete the modification or not. I can’t wait to see the actual numbers once this nightmare is over. I want to know the average % of mortgages that were actually modified by Saxon. They should only receive the incentive payments for those that are actually modified, not those who they “attempt” to help.