Alison Frankel

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.

Schneiderman didn’t claim that New York pension funds actually have a stake in the Countrywide MBS trusts. Instead, he claimed standing under the parens patriae doctrine, asserting that he intervened “to protect the interests of the public and absent investors.” And that raises a question that Bank of New York Mellon — once it recovers from the shock of the AG’s filing — is sure to argue to Judge Barbara Kapnick as she weighs whether to approve the proposed settlement. Are investors — and the public at large — better off if the New York AG kills the proposed BofA settlement?

There are a lot of ways to look at the question. In the narrowest interpretation, will investors be able to recover more money for breach of warranty claims against Countrywide than they would under the settlement? Maybe. There have only been a few investor put-back cases filed against Countrywide, mostly by David Grais of Grais & Ellsworth, and they’re not far enough along to lay odds on their success. Mayer Brown, which represents BNY Mellon in the BofA proposed settlement, argues that a lot of obstacles stand between Countrywide noteholders and a windfall recovery from Bank of America. Those range from the loan-by-loan evaluation investors will have to make of individual underlying mortgages to Bank of America’s claim that it’s not liable for Countrywide’s failings.

The hearing scheduled to take place tomorrow before Manhattan state supreme court judge Barbara Kapnick could turn out to be a straight-forward affair. The judge could simply hear brief arguments on whether to expedite discovery on Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement of Countrywide MBS noteholders’ breach-of-warranty claims, issue a ruling, and call it a day. Given that this will be the first time that the architects of the deal — Mayer Brown for Bank of New York Mellon, the MBS trustee; Gibbs & Bruns for a group of 22 major institutional investors ; and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for BofA — will be gathered in the same room with the small but feisty group of lawyers opposing the settlement, I’m hoping for some heated rhetoric, at the very least. Remember, this hearing is the first chance for these lawyers to register their positions with Judge Kapnick. It’s going to be very interesting to see what each of them make of that opportunity.

The nominal issue before the judge comes from a July 27 order to show cause, filed by Scott + Scott on behalf of a four public pension funds. The show-cause order argues that the schedule suggested by BNY Mellon (and approved by Judge Kapnick) doesn’t offer investors a chance to reach an informed decision about whether to oppose or endorse the proposed deal. Noteholders are supposed to file intervention notices by August 30. Scott + Scott says investors need to conduct expedited discovery before then.

“Document discovery is needed to evaluate the reliability of the expert opinions and the reasonableness of the settlement,” the filing says. “The [self-styled] public pension fund committee also believes that discovery bearing upon the interests and potential conflicts of the negotiating parties, the adequacy of the development of the facts, as well as the basis of the expert reports, is warranted.”

Faced with a barrage of investor criticism (see here, here, and here) of its proposed $8.5 billion mortgage-backed securities settlement with Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, the MBS trustee, has released the expert reports underlying the agreement. The reports—in particular the valuation report by Brian Lin, the managing director of RRMS Advisors—provide an extraordinary window into how this deal got done. They may not change anyone’s mind about the fairness of the settlement proposal, but they answer a lot of the questions that challengers of the deal have raised.

Let’s start with the numbers that were on the table when Gibbs & Bruns and its group of 22 major Countrywide MBS investors sat down across from Bank of America and its lawyers from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The outside range of the investor group’s demands was $52.6 billion, according to Lin’s report. At the low end, the investors asked for $27 billion. Bank of America, according to the Lin report, calculated that investors could claim no more than $4 billion.

Lin began his evaluation of the investors’ Countrywide MBS claims by reviewing the presentations that the Gibbs group and BofA made to one another. (His company, RRMS, is a mortgage-backed securities consultant that advises MBS investors, packagers, and issuers. BoNY and its Mayer Brown lawyers selected Lin’s firm to provide an expert opinion after beauty contest interviews with several candidates, which had to have MBS expertise but couldn’t have a significant relationship with Bank of America.) Interestingly, Lin’s report indicates that the valuation methodology employed by both the investors and BofA was almost the same, although the two sides obviously plugged different assumptions into the basic formula.

As Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion deal to resolve put-back claims by Countrywide mortgage-backed certificate holders comes under increased scrutiny, including a new inquiry by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and two newly-filed objections to the deal by major investor groups, some very intriguing news has emerged about Grais & Ellsworth, the prominent MBS investors’ firm that’s leading the charge against the BofA settlement.

Grais & Ellsworth filed new objections to the deal on behalf of two investor groups with large Countrywide MBS holdings Wednesday. But its first objection to the BofA settlement came on behalf of a coalition of MBS investors under the name Walnut Place, which had sued Bank of America in February. (Walnut Pace asserted put-back claims in two of the 530 trusts that offered Countrywide mortgage-backed certificates.) In a July 5 petition to intervene in the New York state supreme court proceeding to evaluate the proposed $8.5 billion BofA deal, Walnut Place raised some pretty serious questions about Bank of New York Mellon’s strong motivation, as trustee for the Countrywide MBS offerings, to go along with BofA’s proposal. Grais & Ellsworth also criticized the trustee for having “negotiated [the global deal] in secret, without the knowledge or consent of Walnut Place.”

That accusation of secret negotiations designed to cut out Walnut Place seems like powerful evidence of a potentially collusive deal—but according to Bank of New York Mellon, it’s just not true. In a  July 11 response to the Grais & Ellsworth filing, the trustee’s lawyers at Mayer Brown say Grais & Ellsworth was invited to join settlement discussions between Bank of America and the Gibbs & Bruns investor group that ultimately negotiated the proposed deal. But instead of opting to participate in the process, Grais & Ellsworth proceeded to file Walnut Place’s suit against BofA. Mayer Brown asserts.