Alison Frankel

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.

The New York AG argued that the duties of an indentured trustee change when there’s a default. (He also asserted that BNY Mellon failed even to carry out its “ministerial” duties to MBS holders.) Defaults trigger a heightened duty under New York law, which says that a trustee must behave as a “prudent man” would with regard to his own affairs. State-law precedent, the AG brief said, holds that the “prudent man” standard of care is a fiduciary duty — and BNY Mellon breached it when the bank failed to notify Countrywide MBS investors of defaults in underlying mortgage loans.

BNY Mellon’s brief countered with two arguments, one legal and one factual. Even if default triggers a heightened standard of care for indentured trustees, it argued, those new duties are still governed by the trust agreement. The bank quoted language referring to the extra duties as “a relatively minor change in the legal landscape.” Moreover, according to BNY Mellon, there has been no default, under the precise language of the pooling and servicing agreements. “The Events of Default are strictly defined and none has occurred,” the brief said.

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.

Over the last couple of months Bank of America has taken a stock market and regulatory beating so brutal that it’s reportedly considering the previously unthinkable option of putting Countrywide into Chapter 11. BofA’s mortgage-backed securities exposure seems to have no upper limit; throughout BofA’s long hot summer, it felt like every week investors surfaced with new claims that BofA, Countrywide, or Merrill Lynch violated state and federal securities laws in MBS offerings.

Investors and bond insurers have, of course, made the same claims about Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a host of other MBS securitizers. Most notably, the Federal Housing Finance Agency ruined a lot of people’s Labor Day weekend when it filed 17 suits against just about every financial institution in the MBS game (except for Wells Fargo), asserting state and federal securities law claims.

But the difference, so far, between Bank of America and everyone else has been that BofA is facing litigation not just for securities claims but also for breaching contracts with MBS investors. Mortgage-backed securities, remember, were typically sold through trusts governed by pooling and servicing agreements. Those pooling and servicing contracts usually included provisions calling for the originator of the underlying mortgages to repurchase any loans found to violate the lender’s representations and warranties about their quality. Suits based on alleged breaches of reps and warranties are known as put-back claims — and there’s good reason to believe that banks’ put-back exposure may ultimately dwarf their securities law liability.

On Wednesday night, Grais & Ellsworth filed a 29-page brief laying out its arguments for why Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide mortgage-backed securities investors belongs in federal court, not in New York state court, where Bank of New York Mellon, as Countrywide MBS trustee, filed it. I’ll talk about Grais’s assertions in a moment, but first I want to explain why the jurisdictional question is so crucial to the ultimate fate of BofA’s proposed deal. Two transcripts tell that tale.

BNY Mellon, you’ll recall, used a highly unusual device when it asked for court approval of the proposed $8.5 billion settlement in late June. The bank filed the case as an Article 77 proceeding in New York state supreme court, taking advantage of a state law that permits trustees to seek a judge’s endorsement of their decisions. Using Article 77 was a deliberate tactic by BNY Mellon, BofA, and the 22 institutional investors who support the settlement. The lawyers who put together the deal considered and rejected other possible vehicles for court approval, but decided that Article 77 was the fastest, cleanest way to resolve claims involving 530 separate trusts. The provision, which is usually invoked in garden-variety trust cases, gives broad discretion to trustees, who are generally assumed to be acting in the best interests of trust beneficiaries.

The Article 77 strategy looked brilliant at the first hearing on the settlement before New York state supreme court judge Barbara Kapnick. According to a transcript of the August 5 hearing, Judge Kapnick shot down objectors to the deal who, in her view, wanted to proceed with discovery as if the case were a class action. “It’s important to remember that this petition was brought as an Article 77 petition,” the judge said. “It’s not a class action. There aren’t provisions in there to opt out that you are talking about. That’s not what this is. If you started it, maybe that’s what you would have done, but they started it and that’s what they did. I have to work, at least now, within the confines of the proceeding that is before me.”

Monitoring the docket Tuesday afternoon, as motions to intervene in Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide mortgage-backed securities noteholders piled up, was sort of like watching guests arrive a cocktail party. Oh, here come the hedge funds. Look, there’s a bunch of insurance companies. The public pension funds always head straight for the shrimp. Homeowners? Did anyone invite them? And, of course, Goldman Sachs had to show up fashionably late.

Other party guests may have looked glitzier, but none of Tuesday’s intervention motions is more important to the ultimate determination of the proposed settlement’s fairness than the one filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No one knows the value of mortgage repurchase claims-the claims the proposed BofA deal resolves-better than FHFA.

Here’s why. In the MBS boom years, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages from Countrywide and many other lenders. The government-sponsored entities packaged the loans into mortgage-backed bonds, just like other MBS issuers. But after the housing bubble burst, and Fannie and Freddie were placed under the federal government’s conservatorship, FHFA had both more of an incentive to get information about those underlying loans than other MBS issuers–and more power to get the information. In July 2010 the agency announced that it had issued 64 subpoenas for mortgage loan documents. Last October it brought in Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan to advise on litigation against mortgage lenders that breached representations and warranties about the loans they sold to Fannie and Freddie.

Last October, when BofA’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement of Countrywide mortgage-backed securities breach of contract claims was just a twinkle in Kathy Patrick’s eye, David Grais of Grais & Ellsworth told me that one of the biggest problems for lawyers representing disgruntled MBS noteholders was the investors’ reluctance to come forward. Noteholders were afraid to provoke the banks that issued mortgage-backed securities, Grais said, so they didn’t want to sue under their own names. That’s why one of Grais & Ellsworth’s early put-back cases was filed on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of anonymous Countrywide MBS investors operating under the name Walnut Place.

It’s also why the Gibbs & Brun investor group that negotiated the BofA deal made such a splash. Kathy Patrick’s big institutional investor clients, including Pimco, BlackRock, and the New York Federal Reserve’s Maiden Lane funds, showed their faces when they offered public support for the proposed $8.5 billion settlement. In fact, after Grais’s Walnut Place investors filed an objection to the proposed deal, supporters of the settlement drew a contrast between the Gibbs group’s public face and Walnut’s anonymity.

But as time runs out for investors to claim a place in the litigation over the proposed settlement, more and more Countrywide MBS noteholders are shrugging off secrecy. On Monday, six new interventions motions appeared in either the original state court docket or in federal court, where Grais & Ellsworth removed the case last week. (A seventh intervention petition, by American Fidelity Assurance, popped up Tuesday morning.) The big news was the placeholder petition Grais filed on behalf of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which says it is “the receiver of numerous banks and owner of many certificates issued by many of the trusts that would be covered by the proposed settlement.” (Hard to know from that how big a stake the FDIC has in the Countrywide MBS offerings.) Like the six Federal Home Loan Banks that have already intervened in the proposed settlement, the FDIC isn’t yet objecting to the deal, but said it wants more information to evaluate the fairness of the deal.

There is never a dull moment in Bank of America’s attempt to resolve its Countrywide mortgage-backed securities liability. In a stunning move Friday, the law firm leading the fight against BofA’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide MBS noteholders removed the case from New York state supreme court to federal court. “The purpose of removal is to make sure that this proceeding is adjudicated in the proper forum,” Grais & Ellsworth wrote in a letter to lawyers for Bank of New York Mellon (the Countrywide MBS trustee) and for the big institutional investors who crafted the proposed settlement. “We believe in good faith that this proceeding is subject to federal jurisdiction as a mass action under the Class Action Fairness Act.” (Here’s the Grais & Ellsworth letter with the removal petition attached.)

The removal to federal court plunges the proposed settlement, at least temporarily, into more uncertainty than ever. Judge Barbara Kapnick, who is presiding over the unusual state court proceeding to evaluate the proposed deal, had imposed an August 30 deadline for Countrywide MBS investors to intervene in the case. She had also established a preliminary schedule for the discovery Grais & Ellsworth and other objectors’ counsel have demanded from BNY Mellon, BofA, and the institutional investors and their Gibbs & Bruns counsel. The removal to federal court means that Judge Kapnick isn’t in charge of the case, so it’s not clear whether lawyers are required to abide by her schedule.

The Grais & Ellsworth filing was a surprise tactic. The firm has been in the state court litigation since early July, filing its initial petition to intervene only days after Bank of New York Mellon, as Countrywide trustee, filed a suit asking for court approval of the settlement of investors’ claims. David Grais even appeared before Judge Kapnick at an August 5 hearing on objectors’ requests for expedited discovery. Grais & Ellsworth apparently waited to remove the case to federal court until Judge Kapnick granted the firm’s motion to intervene in the state court case on Monday. (Grais, who was not in the office Friday, didn’t respond to my e-mail; his partner Owen Cyrulnik, who signed the letter to opposing counsel, didn’t respond to an e-mail and phone message.)

As expected, the Delaware attorney general’s office moved Tuesday night to intervene in Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide mortgage-backed noteholders. The Delaware petition to intervene and supporting brief are notable for their moderate tone, in contrast to last week’s fiery objection and counterclaims by the New York attorney general. Tuesday’s filings, signed by Delaware deputy AG Jeremy Eicher, said that Delaware is concerned about BofA’s indemnification of the MBS trustee, Bank of New York Mellon — the same conflict-of-interest allegation raised by just about every intervenor who so far has surfaced in the case. Delaware, which noted that two of the Countrywide MBS trusts are Delaware vehicles, argued that it needs more information about the proposed settlement in order to protect investors.

The real story, though, is that both the New York and Delaware AGs believe BofA and BNY Mellon can’t resolve their liability to MBS investors without including regulators in the deal. After all, the proposed $8.5 billion settlement encroaches on turf already claimed by New York AG Eric Schneiderman and Delaware AG Joseph Biden III; in June, the New York Times broke the news that the New York and Delaware AG offices were investigating the banks involved in the mortgage-backed securitization process — including sponsors and underwriters such as Countrywide and BofA and trustees such as BNY Mellon.

The Delaware and New York securitization probes, which are running parallel to the 50-state AG investigation of banks’ mortgage foreclosure practices, gave Schneiderman and Biden a platform to argue that MBS investors, as well as homeowners, are affected by slipshod mortgage underwriting practices and widespread foreclosures. In the wider foreclosure-resolution negotiations between mortgage lenders and state AGs, New York and Delaware have taken a lead in calling for banks to also address MBS liability.

Monday was (another) dreadful day for Bank of America. The bank’s shares closed at a two-year low, thanks in part to AIG’s double whammy: a $10 billion fraud suit against BofA and the insurer’s simultaneous motion to intervene in opposition to BofA’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide mortgage-backed securities noteholders. Bank of America and Countrywide’s securitization trustee, Bank of New York Mellon, thought the $8.5 billion deal would put their MBS woes behind them. Instead the proposed settlement seems to have made the two banks into bigger targets than they were before reaching an agreement with 22 big MBS investors.

There’s plenty of reason for BofA to worry about the AIG fraud suit. First off, the New York state court complaint was filed by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, a familiar opponent for Bank of America. Quinn is counsel to the bond insurer MBIA in its MBS litigation against Countrywide, in which New York state supreme court judge Eileen Bransten has consistently sided with MBIA and Quinn Emanuel. (Among other crucial rulings, Judge Bransten rejected Bank of America’s preliminary argument that it’s not liable for Countrywide’s missteps.) Quinn also represents Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which forced Bank of America into a $2.8 billion settlement of MBS claims in January, and Allstate, which filed a $700 million MBS case against Countrywide in December. Different Quinn Emanuel lawyers are involved in the various BofA and Countrywide cases, but the firm isn’t starting from scratch.

The AIG fraud complaint is also a canny document. The suit lumps together allegations against Countrywide, Merrill Lynch, and BofA, painting all of them with the same tarry brush even though Countrywide and Merrill Lynch committed a good chunk of the alleged wrongdoing before they became part of BofA. Quinn includes public record information about their manifestly-deficient underwriting practices, but has brought the case as a fraud suit — not a contract case accusing BofA, Countrywide, and Merrill of breaching the representations and warranties on the mortgage loans underlying the securitizations AIG invested in. That way, AIG doesn’t have to show that it controls 25 percent of the voting rights, the threshold for standing in a securitization contract case. But under the causes of action the complaint asserts — state-law claims and federal claims under the Securities Act of 1933 — Quinn Emanuel doesn’t have to show that BofA, Countrywide, and Merrill acted with fraudulent intent.

Before Thursday night, opposition to Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement with Countrywide mortgage-backed securities investors consisted of a handful of investor groups represented by a handful of law firms. Even if you counted the six Federal Home Loan Banks that have moved to intervene but haven’t yet gone on record opposing the deal, intervenors represented less than 7 percent of all Countrywide MBS noteholders. The 22 gargantuan institutional investors that negotiated the settlement were a much more potent force.

That all changed when New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman -- in a move that stunned deal proponents — filed an explosive motion to intervene in the $8.5 billion settlement. Schneiderman didn’t just register his opposition to the proposed settlement, which he said had been reached “without ever giving beneficiaries or their representatives an opportunity to test [whether] the proposed settlement is reasonable.” He went far, far beyond mere opposition: Schneiderman accused the Countrywide MBS trustee, Bank of New York Mellon, of breaching its fiduciary duty and said that Bank of America may have aided and abetted the breach. And to show that he was serious about those assertions, Schneiderman actually filed counterclaims against BNY Mellon along with his intervention motion.

The countersuit — a truly revolutionary filing — alleges three causes of action against BNY Mellon, in what is thought to be the first time the AG has accused an MBS trustee of fraud. Schneiderman claimed the bank breached its duty to investors because the settlement includes indemnification for the trustee — a “direct financial benefit” for BNY Mellon, according to the AG’s filing. Schneiderman also asserted that BNYM let down Countrywide MBS investors long before proposing the $8.5 billion settlement, by failing to notify certificate holders that underlying Countrywide mortgages were in default. Finally, the New York AG accused Bank of New York Mellon of securities fraud under New York’s Martin Act.