Alison Frankel

This post was co-written with Erin Geiger Smith.

Like hundreds other Twitterati this weekend, we read with righteous amusement Joshua Brown’s Reformed Broker screed against Bank of America. The bank, you probably know, disclosed Friday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it is paying former executives Sallie Krawcheck and Joseph Price a total of $11 million for the pleasure of their departure, a year-long non-compete agreement, and a promise not to sue for, as the British say, being made redundant. The Reformed Broker found the deal offensive, to say the least.

“This is why they hate you and want you to die,” Brown wrote, in a post that ricocheted around Twitter like tween commentary on Kim Kardashian’s wedding. “Elevenmilliondollars? What the hell world are you inhabiting?” Brown wrote. “You look completely ridiculous with news like this at a time when thousands of people are massing in every major city in the country to make the case that you don’t deserve to exist. At a time when you’re being investigated for employing robosigners just to maintain a certain level of foreclosures processed per month. At a time when you’re laying off rank-and-file employees not by the hundreds, not by the thousands — but in the tens of thousands…This Is what you do with the money? With OUR money? Are you crazy?”

We assumed — and we know we’re not alone in this — that BofA had to fork over the $11 million to Krawcheck and Price because the October 6 “separation agreements” were part and parcel of their prior employment contracts. That was the infuriating but understandable explanation AIG offered in 2009 when Congress raked it over the coals for paying $169 million in bonuses to some of the execs who cratered the company.

But guess what we found out Monday? BofA didn’t agree to pay Krawcheck and Price $11 million because it had to. The bank is doing so because it wants to. We’ll explain that below. But what we still don’t know, after poring through SEC filings, is why the bank — which was excoriated for paying billions in bonuses to Merrill execs after the 2008 merger; which has a share price fluttering around $6; and which recently announced its intention to charge customers for the privilege of paying for purchases with their own money — would agree to payments that seem like little more than a PR disaster.

Bank of America, according to a March 30 BofA proxy filing, does not have contractual golden parachute deals in place for its top execs. “We do not have any agreements with our executive officers that provide for cash severance payments upon termination of employment or in connection with a change in control,” the proxy said. Although Joe Price’s employment agreement is not public, Krawcheck’s 2010 agreement does not guarantee any money in the event she’s asked to move along. (A Bank of America spokesperson declined to comment for this article.) No pre-existing contract, in other words, required the Bank to come up with “separation” cash for Krawcheck and Price.

Last week a rumor made the rounds of hedge funds that trade in Bank of America and MBIA shares: The bank had reputedly agreed to settle the bond insurer’s mortgage-backed securities fraud and put-back claims for $5 billion. The rumor turned out to be false, or at least premature, since no settlement is in the offing at the moment. But the size of the rumored deal gives you a sense of the magnitude of the litigation between the banks that packaged and sold mortgage-backed securities and the bond insurers that wrote policies protecting MBS investors. We are talking about billions of dollars — perhaps tens of billions — at stake in suits by MBIA, Syncora, Ambac, and Financial Guaranty against Countrywide, Credit Suisse, GMAC, Morgan Stanley, and other MBS defendants.

Last week, Manhattan state supreme court judge Eileen Bransten, who has been the leading jurist in the bond insurer cases against MBS issuers, heard oral arguments on the issue that will determine the magnitude of the banks’ liability: Can bond insurers demand damages based on banks’ misrepresentations on the day deals were signed? Or can MBS issuers point to the housing bust, and not their deficient underwriting, as the reason so many loans have gone bad in the years after the MBS were sold? The case argued Wednesday before Judge Bransten concerned summary judgment motions in the MBIA and Syncora suits against Countrywide, but as the judge noted in her introductory remarks to the overflow crowd in her courtroom, “I understand that this [argument] has a major impact on lots of people.”

For everyone who couldn’t squeeze into Judge Bransten’s courtroom, I’ve gotten hold of transcripts of the day-long hearing. I’m going to focus on the morning session on the loss causation issue, but here’s a link to the afternoon session on consolidating the issue of Bank of America’s successor liability for Countrywide MBS, which is specific to BofA.

With the news Wednesday that Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has “lost confidence” in the multistate AG talks with five big banks and is revving up to sue, coupled with last week’s announcement by California AG Kamala Harris that she’s also dropping out of talks and launching her own investigation, I’ve been wondering what shape an AG suit against mortgage lenders would take. I reached out to both the New York and Delaware attorneys general offices, since they were the first to start talking about filing their own cases. They didn’t return my calls. But according to the bank lawyers I talked to (caveat emptor), there’s a huge gap between the wrongs the states will be able to show and the relief for troubled homeowners that they say they want.

“There’s a fundamental disconnect between what they want and they claims they might have,” one bank lawyer said.

Let’s put aside securities fraud claims the states may have for troubled mortgage-backed securities, since those have nothing to do with the robosigning revelations that led all 50 states to enter talks with Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally Financial a year ago. The basis of the talks has been deficiencies in the foreclosure process. Mortgage servicers took all sorts of shortcuts as they pushed an unprecedented surge of homeowners into foreclosure beginning in 2008. It’s pretty much undisputed that foreclosure law firms filed untold numbers of false certifications and deficient affidavits with the courts in states that require foreclosures to be approved by a judge.

The $3.4 billion Indian trust land settlement known as Cobell has been one of the most hotly-litigated and longest-running class actions in history. It took almost two decades for lawyers representing hundreds of thousands of Native Americans with land held in trust by the U.S. Department of the Interior to win recompense for their clients. Even then the settlement wasn’t final until Congress signed off and Washington, D.C., federal judge Thomas Hogan approved the deal on June 21.

So you can certainly understand why the lawyers representing the class members who have waited so long for justice weren’t happy that Ted Frank of the Center for Class Action Fairness filed a notice of appeal of Judge Hogan’s ruling to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit in August. Frank, who represents an objector named Kimberly Craven, has argued that the Cobell settlement suffers from the same problems that led the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the certification of a class of female Wal-Mart employees in the Dukes case — a decision handed down the same day Judge Hogan approved the Cobell settlement. Frank and Craven aren’t exactly beloved for standing in the way of billions of dollars going out to allegedly victimized Native Americans, but Frank told me Thursday that his client’s appeal is a matter of principle: No matter how righteous the cause, the process must be legitimate.

That’s little solace to class counsel, who reacted with dismay to Craven’s notice of appeal. “The delay caused by Craven’s appeal means that more elderly and more infirm class members will pass on without obtaining justice that they deserve,” the class brief said. “The human cost of Craven’s appeal can never be quantified, and as this court has found, many of the class members depend on their trust funds for the most basic staples of life,” wrote class lawyers Dennis Gingold and Keith Harper and Michael Pearl of Kilpatrick Townsend Stockton. It was a heartfelt argument, and all the more so because, according to the Cobell lawyers, Craven has tried to block this settlement in both Congress and the courts, and has managed to rally almost none of the nearly half-million class members to her cause.

In August, when Johnson & Johnson disclosed its deal to resolve criminal allegations that it falsely marketed the potent schizophrenic drug Risperdal, I said that if ever a board was ripe for a big, fat shareholder derivative suit, it was J&J’s. The Risperdal settlement was the company’s third criminal plea in a little more than a year, on top of a Justice Department and Food and Drug Administration investigation of its over-the-counter children’s drugs, state attorneys general subpoenas, whistleblower suits, and product recalls. The 111-page consolidated complaint that Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd filed against J&J’s board members last December offered more red flags than a training school for toreadors.

Judge Freda Wolfson of New Jersey federal court agreed in a Sept. 30 opinion that the allegations the plaintiffs firms had raised were “troubling and pervasive,” noting in particular that claims the board ignored systemic illegal conduct were “disconcerting to the court.” Near the end of the ruling, after analyzing all of the shareholders’ assertions, the judge cited “what appears to be serious corporate misconduct on J&J’s part.”

And then she threw out the case.

Judge Wolfson found that the shareholders’ complaint didn’t offer sufficiently specific evidence that individual board members were aware of problems at the company and nevertheless failed to do anything. “None of the various types of red flags suggest that the board acted in bad faith,” the judge wrote. “Adding all of those allegations together does not lead me to a different conclusion in this case. While plaintiffs’ allegations are disconcerting, they do not contain the [requisite] detail.”

The most dramatic moment at the Sept. 21 hearing on Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide mortgage-backed securities investors came near the end, when Gibbs & Bruns partner Robert Madden stood up to address Manhattan federal judge William Pauley’s concerns about how the settlement came to be. Tall and clear-spoken, Madden captured the judge’s attention as he explained that his clients, a group of 22 large institutional investors, hadn’t entered a sweetheart deal with BofA, but had banded together to force the bank to pony up billions to investors for claims BofA thought it would never have to deal with.

“The problem was that these repurchase claims were lying fallow,” Madden said, according to the transcript of the hearing. “No one was doing anything. None of (the investors now objecting to the deal) were doing anything. And, I’m sorry to say, the trustee wasn’t doing anything. Limitations were running on those claims, and nothing was happening.”

Or was it?

I’ve learned that in the summer of 2010, as Gibbs & Bruns began to push Countrywide MBS trustee Bank of New York Mellon to act on its assertions that mortgages underlying the Countrywide securities were deficient, another group of Countrywide MBS investors was finalizing its own notice of default to serve on BNY Mellon. Members of the RMBS Clearinghouse, run by former Patton Boggs partner Talcott Franklin, had undertaken an extensive analysis of the underlying Countrywide mortgages, and, according to two sources familiar with the Clearinghouse’s activities, were on the verge of sending BNY Mellon a notice that would trigger put-back litigation.

When New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman sued Bank of New York Mellon in August, the AG asserted that the Countrywide mortgage-backed securitization trustee had breached its duty to MBS investors. “As trustee, BNYM owed and owes a fiduciary duty of undivided loyalty,” said the AG’s suit, which was filed as a counterclaim in BNY Mellon’s case seeking approval of the proposed $8.5 billion Bank of America settlement with MBS investors. “[BNYM] breached that duty to [investors'] detriment and disadvantage, by failing to notify them of issues regarding the quality of loans underlying their securities.”

But according to BNY Mellon, it had no such duty.

The bank’s lawyers at Mayer Brown and Dechert filed a 14-page brief this week outlining its interpretation of the responsibilities of an MBS securitization trustee. The filing came at the direction of Manhattan federal Judge William Pauley, who’s deciding whether the BofA MBS settlement should be heard in state court, where BNY Mellon filed it, or in federal court, where key objectors to the proposed settlement want it to proceed. Pauley was concerned with the “securities exception” to the Class Action Fairness Act, which could end up guiding his decision on the forum question. For BNY Mellon, however, any discussion of its trustee responsibilities is fraught with danger. It’s already facing the New York AG’s claims, and several other state attorneys general have threatened similar actions. MBS investors, meanwhile, are pushing BNY Mellon (and other securitization trustees) to bring put-back claims, with the implied threat that investors will take action against trustees unless they do.

BNY Mellon’s brief pushes back against that pressure, asserting that the trustee’s responsibilities don’t extend much beyond the ministerial duties spelled out in the pooling and servicing agreements governing MBS trusts. New York law, the filing said, imposes only two addition burdens: the trustee must avoid conflicts of interest and must perform its ministerial functions “with due care.” According to BNY Mellon, there’s an important distinction between ordinary trustees and indenture trustees. Indenture trustees, it said, do not have “a traditional duty of due care.” Its duties — beyond those two basic responsibilities implied in New York law — are strictly defined by the pooling and servicing trust contracts.

Helen Chaitman of Becker & Poliakoff represents more than 300 investors who had accounts with Bernard Madoff. For more than two years she’s hammered away at one particular argument in federal bankruptcy court, in Congress, even on YouTube: Madoff bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard of Baker & Hostetler shouldn’t be allowed to demand the return of profits that Madoff investors pulled out of their accounts as long ago as 2002, six years before the Ponzi scheme imploded in December 2008. On Tuesday night, Chaitman finally found vindication, even though it wasn’t in any of her cases. Manhattan federal judge Jed Rakoff, ruling in Picard’s fraud case against the owners of the New York Mets, concluded that a section of the federal bankruptcy code precludes Picard from attempting to claw back money Madoff investors pulled out of the Ponzi scheme before 2006.

“This is something I’ve been saying from the beginning,” Chaitman told me. “Anyone who didn’t withdraw their money in the last two years [of Madoff's scheme] is out completely.” Jonathan Landers of Milberg, who represents 30 clawback clients, agreed: “This is a very, very significant ruling.”

That’s putting it mildly. Judge Rakoff’s 18-page ruling could completely upend the Madoff bankruptcy. Among the big-name Madoff investors who would be off Picard’s hook completely if Rakoff’s ruling stands is former Securities and Exchange Commission general counsel David Becker, who’s in hot water for allegedly failing to alert SEC commissioners of a potential conflict of interest stemming from his parents’ long-closed Madoff account. Picard had filed a clawback suit against Becker, who inherited money after his parents’ account was liquidated in 2002; Rakoff’s ruling would wipe out Picard’s suit.

When I first read the Federal Housing Finance Agency Inspector General’s report criticizing Freddie Mac’s $1.35 billion MBS put-back settlement with Bank of America, I wondered if the FHFA IG had just exposed billions of dollars in untapped bank liability. The IG report notes, after all, that Freddie’s deal with BofA (unlike Fannie Mae’s simultaneous $1.52 billion BofA settlement) resolves not only pending breach of contract claims, but also any future claims that Countrywide breached representations and warranties on the mortgages it sold Freddie. Those are exactly the kinds of global settlements banks are going to have to reach if they have any hope of resolving their MBS put-back liability.

So if the FHFA Inspector General is castigating Freddie for overlooking BofA’s liability for mortgages that defaulted four or five years after they were issued — and FHFA is generally reckoned to be the most experienced evaluator of reps and warranties claims there is — have other put-back claimants underestimated potential bank liability? Are bond insurers and MBS investors making the same supposed mistake as Freddie Mac?

The short answer is no.

The IG report faults Freddie for failing to account for the exotic mortgage loans that proliferated in the housing bubble. Homeowners with interest-only or adjustable-rate mortgages often made it through the early teaser-rate years, only to default when they had to begin making higher payments. The FHFA IG report indicates that Freddie Mac has seen tens of thousands of these mortgages go into default three to five years after they were issued.

You had to be a sophisticated investor if you wanted to give J. Ezra Merkin your money. The hedge fund director made that clear in the offering documents for three of his funds: investors had to entrust considerable assets to him (at least $5 million for individuals and $25 million for businesses); had to conduct their own due diligence before deciding to invest; and had to accept the risk that Merkin’s funds might lose their money. Unsaid, but well-understood by many of the investors in Merkin’s Ascot fund (at least according to Merkin lawyer Andrew Levander of Dechert), was that Merkin would be feeding investors’ money to Bernard Madoff.

Merkin earned between 1 and 5 percent fees on the hundreds of millions of dollars he funneled to Madoff beginning in the early 1990s. At the same time, his own Madoff investment blossomed to more than $100 million. When Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was exposed in December 2008, Merkin was as stunned as his hedge fund clients, according to his lawyers. Merkin also claimed that he and his family were among Madoff’s biggest victims, with nine-figure paper losses.

Many doubted that depictions of events, including the New York attorney general, who filed a state-law fraud action against Merkin; real estate developer and Merkin investor Morton Zuckerman, who brought in Susman Godfrey for a New York state supreme court suit; and investors in Merkin’s Ascot, Gabriel, and Arial funds, whose cases were consolidated in June 2009 in a Manhattan federal court securities class action. The hedge fund investors, represented by lead counsel from Abbey Spanier Rodd Abrams & Paradis and Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, alleged that Merkin had misrepresented the operation of his funds in offering documents that implied Merkin himself — and not Bernie Madoff — would be making investment decisions. They also asserted that Merkin ignored warning signs.