The Step Transaction and Single Transaction Doctrine

Jim Macklin and Dan Edstrom did a great job of packing a great deal of information into 28 minutes of talk time on the Neil Garfield Show last night. I am taking a couple of weeks off the show to do some common follow-up procedures to my heart surgery two years ago. Jim Macklin stepped in and did a great job of getting information into the hands of lawyers and other listeners in what turned out to be a mini-seminar on how to apply Federal tax law to the issue of ownership of the the loan. It should be heard more than once to get all the nuances they presented.

Their point was that all the binding commitments were in place before the mortgage bonds were sold and before any loans were even considered for approval. The bottom line is that the customary practice in the finance industry was to sell forward — i.e., sell the bonds based upon loans that either did not exist or had not yet been acquired by the REMIC trusts. THEN they went out originating loans and acquiring loans.

As we have previously discussed here and elsewhere, the trusts and the trustee never even had a bank account through which the “pass through” assets and income would be funneled to investors. But that only adds fuel to the fire that Edstrom and Macklin were talking about. From a federal tax law perspective, which should pre-empt any state interpretation, the loans belonged to the investors from the start — not the trusts.

The trusts could only be used as a representative entity in litigation if they were funded with the investors’ money. Our research strongly supports the conclusion that no such funding took place. In fact, our research indicates the funding of the trust with the investors money was impossible because no trust accounts were ever created.

Thus you have the “straight line” that goes from the investors to the borrower. This goes directly to the issue of standing. Because once it is established that the consideration for the only real single transaction flowed from the investors to the borrower, no transaction between intermediaries were true.

They were false transactions supported by fabricated documents with no payment of consideration. Article 9 of the UCC completely supports this interpretation along with decisions interpreting federal tax law as to the real parties in interest. As a result the issue of standing is resolved — only the investors have standing to collect on the loans for which borrowers concede they received the money or the benefit.

The assignments shown in court are between intermediary parties who had no actual transaction with no actual payment or consideration because the payment or consideration had already passed through binding commitments set up by the so-called securitization scheme. By not funding the trusts, the broker dealers were free to use the money as they wished and they did.

They broke every rule in the underwriting book because they were traveling under a different set of rules than the investors or the borrowers thought. Because they had promised to make the payments due under the trust document — the pooling and servicing agreement — and because their binding commitments to make the payments for principal, interest, taxes and insurance already existed prior to the sale the mortgage bonds and prior to the loan to the borrower (see servicer advances, trust advances etc.).

As a result, the investors who should have been on the notes and mortgages were deprived of the documentation they were promised in the PSA. In plain language the mortgage documents and the bond documentation were pure fabrications without any underlying transaction between the parties to those transactions. No transaction between the investor and the trust. And no transaction between the “lender” on the note and mortgage and the borrower.

Hence the allegation of investors in their claims against the broker dealers that the note and mortgage is unenforceable to the detriment of the investors, who are left with common law claims for recovery of damages without any security instrument to protect them. hence the claim that borrowers are being sued by intermediaries who were strangers to the ACTUAL transaction with REAL consideration and terms to which both lender and borrower were bound. The terms agreed by the lenders were vastly different than the terms disclosed to borrowers. There was no meeting of the minds.

Posted in Corruption, evidence, expert witness, foreclosure defenses, foreclosure mill, Modification, Motions, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer |