By Dave Krieger
It was a telephone conference you would have just died to be on. It appears that county recorders are starting to take notice of the losses in revenue with MERS’s circumvention of their recordation systems. By best conservative projections out of this conference, John O’Brien, Essex County Massachusetts Register of Deeds head is foaming mad that MERS has skated off with (in the event of at least one recordation past the initial filing of the mortgage) with $1.95-million dollars a year that rightfully belongs to Essex County.
“I don’t know of any legal right that MERS has to be above the law, or to even exist for that matter”, claimed O’Brien, who clearly stated that his department summoned Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley to investigate MERS and its apparent disregard for the law. “Homeowners clearly have a right to know (by recordation) who actually owns their loan.”
This author was also on the call, as was Nantucket Attorney Jamie Ranney, who understands the arguments for foreclosure defense thoroughly. He sees MERS being out of existence in 18 months.
Republican Delegate Bob Marshall from Manassas, Virginia was also on the call. He is taking legislative aim at MERS through his Congressional resources. He verified by article what this author was talking about regarding Moody’s Investor Service talking about MERS being a bankruptcy-remote shell entity.
Gretchen Morgensen from the New York Times, also on the call, stated that she was more concerned about the aspects of clouded titles being part of the bigger picture here. The author contributed an overview and the consensus agreed that MERS has done major damage to the recordation system and robbed Essex County of millions of dollars a year. You’ll probably see a blurb on the New York Times about it.
The author’s take on this? Because of the mess at the courthouse with the millions of titles being clouded, attorneys who do quiet title actins will have their work cut out for them, because for every client they represent in court, there will be ten to take their place.