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.”
But then David Grais of Grais & Ellsworth, in a move as bold and novel as the banks’ use of Article 77, removed the case to federal court, arguing that the settlement is a mass action under the federal Class Action Fairness Act. And there, BNY Mellon met with quite a different reception. At a Sept. 1 hearing, Manhattan federal judge William Pauley gave BNY Mellon’s counsel, Matthew Ingber of Mayer Brown, pretty rough treatment. “Isn’t it unusual to use an Article 77 proceeding to seek approval for a settlement of this type,” the judge demanded, according to a transcript of the hearing. “Isn’t it odd that the trustee appears to have chosen such a proceeding whose main benefit appears to be to limit the rights of the trust beneficiaries to opt out of the settlement? You don’t think that is in any way at odds with the trustee’s fiduciary duty to the beneficiaries of the trust?” Judge Pauley went on to grill Ingber on the experts BNY Mellon engaged to determine the fairness of the settlement and the controversial side letter to the settlement agreement in which BofA affirms indemnity for BNY Mellon as trustee.
These are the same issues Grais & Ellsworth and other objectors to the settlement have raised and Judge Pauley is clearly listening to their arguments. It’s dangerous to read too much into how judges behave at preliminary hearings, but if I were BofA, BNY Mellon, or any other supporter of the settlement, I’d prefer my chances before Judge Kapnick a lot more than another hearing in front of Judge Pauley.
