bubbleinfo.com

From the W-S-J:

After losing her condo in San Diego to foreclosure last year, Charissa Kolich thought that at least she was free of mortgage bills.

But Wells Fargo & Co., which holds a home-equity loan made five years ago to Ms. Kolich, last month filed a lawsuit against her in the Superior Court of California, San Diego County, seeking to collect the nearly $72,000 it said she still owed on that second mortgage. “This was all kind of a shock,” says Ms. Kolich, a food-service administrator recently diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.

Banks are coming under increasing political pressure to write off or at least write down second-lien and other junior mortgages as a way to help borrowers keep their homes or extract themselves from heavy debt. As the Wells Fargo suit shows, however, banks often are reluctant to give up on loans when they see a chance of recovering all or part of their money.

This issue will be the focus of a hearing Tuesday by the House Financial Services Committee in Washington. Panel members are due to quiz executives from Wells Fargo, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. about their junior-lien mortgage policies.

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On our regular blog watch is the Mortgage Fraud Blog:

http://www.mortgagefraudblog.com/index.php/

She added this whopper on Beazer Homes settling for $10 million now, and up to $50 million eventually to compensate for these illegal activities:

Beazer, and its subsidiary, Beazer Mortgage Corporation, admit to engaging in several fraudulent mortgage origination practices, including (1) fraudulently retaining so-called “discount points” that should have been used to provide some home-buyers with a decreased interest rate; (2) fraudulently informing some home-buyers that they were receiving a “gift” from a charity to cover their down-payment when, in truth, the price of the home was increased to offset the supposed “gift;” (3) fraudulently circumventing the “Neighborhood Watch” and “Credit Watch” programs of the Department of Housing and Urban Development to avoid action from HUD in response to the high foreclosure rate of some Beazer Mortgage offices; and (4) instituting a strategy of willful blindness with regard to some stated income loans.

But more eye-popping is that the blogger has added 70 stories on mortgage fraud since May 1st!

From www.sddt.com

A federal judicial panel ordered that all lawsuits filed across the nation against Countrywide Financial Corp. alleging predatory lending practices be consolidated and tried in San Diego.

Complaints have been brought by the San Diego city attorney’s office, and attorneys general of California, Florida, West Virginia, Connecticut, Illinois and Indiana.  The decision was announced Tuesday by the Federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) after a Sept. 25 hearing in Boston.

“San Diego has now become ground zero in the legal battle to stop foreclosures and rework these predatory loans that should never have been issued in the first place,” said San Diego City Attorney Michael Aguirre. “Keeping families in their homes is clearly a better option than destroying neighborhoods.”

In its decision, the MDL panel refused to grant Countrywide’s request to withdraw their Section 1407 motion to consolidate the pre-trial proceedings for the two cases that have been settled with the attorneys general of California and Illinois. Those settlements, however, have not yet been finalized. The MDL panel selected the Southern District of California in part because two of the actions are pending in the district, and Countrywide’s principal place of business is in California.

This week, Aguirre filed two additional predatory lending practice lawsuits against Washington Mutual and Wachovia.