Foreclosure defense guru and Regalado pal’s home in foreclosure and the ultimate irony with all the mortgage fraud cases we’ve discussed.

.

Amazing as it may seem, foreclosure defense super lawyer John H. Ruiz and Regalado family pal finds himself in the most ironic situation, his home is now involved in a foreclosure suit filed by his lender, Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust. Ironic isn’t it? You can’t turn on Spanish speaking TV here in Miami without seeing Mr. Ruiz’s face plastered all over it barking about how he’ll save your home from the grips of the evil banks that are trying to take it away from you. According to what Mr. Ruiz told the Daily Business Review, the bank has refused to fund the remaining $140,000 balance of a $6.5 million dollar construction loan because the City of Coral Gables has not granted a certificate of occupancy for the home in question. Assuming you need a certificate of occupancy to live in the home, that strikes me as strange as I’ve seen cars parked in front of the house and on occasion have seen someone watching TV inside the house, presumably someone’s living in the home. On the other hand, the foreclosure suit says that Mr. Ruiz stopped paying his mortgage earlier this summer and that he hasn’t paid the last two years of property taxes on the home. What makes this even more unfortunate is that this foreclosure suit isn’t the only misfortune that’s befallen Mr. Ruiz this summer, just a few weeks back Mr. Ruiz’s yacht “Class Action” apparently sunk at his dock.

Regardless, Mr. Ruiz takes the foreclosure suit in stride, from his statement to the DBR… 

That just shows you that nobody’s immune to the bank’s conduct…

Which makes a perfect intro to our next item of business, the bank misconduct that’s been the subject of many new stories of late. Apparently the U.S. government is getting set to file suit against the banks that were at the epicenter of our real estate meltdown for lying about the quality of mortgages they packaged and sold to investors during the peak of the housing bubble. The government is expected to file suit against Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank to name a few. Isn’t this ironic? The government is basically going to file suit against these banks for lying about the quality and make up of the loans that they were selling as well as the fact that . What makes this all the more ironic is that this is precisely the same behavior the governments go after individuals for in their mortgage fraud prosecutions, in those instances the banks are the victims, in this case I guess the tax payers are the victims?!

We’ve gone through this time and time again, if you’re going to go after the individuals that were involved in these mortgage fraud schemes, you have to go after the banks, in the past we’ve called the lender the “unindicted co conspirators” in these cases. Now that the government has finally agreed and assigned some level of culpability to the banks we have another problem, at least in the instance of the Plantation Cops mortgage fraud trial. From the very beginning the government moved to exclude any evidence of lender negligence from the jury and for reasons unbeknownst to me, the judge agreed. Considering this latest suit the government is filing against these banks, does it make any sense that this lender negligence/misconduct was excluded as a defense strategy for the defendants in this case? Does this make any sense to anyone?