Alison Frankel

If you’re reasonably literate about the financial crisis, you probably know that the credit rating agencies have slipped through the carnage like a cat walking away from a knocked-over vase. With their opinions on publicly offered mortgage-backed securities protected by the First Amendment, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s have won dismissals of the vast majority of MBS investor claims against them in state and federal court, despite powerful evidence from congressional investigations that they worked with underwriters to confer investment-grade ratings on securities backed by dreck. With one possible exception, the only surviving cases against rating agencies involve claims by investors in private placements, who have successfully argued that private ratings aren’t protected free speech.

The near-spotless litigation record of the rating agencies means we’ve seen very little internal evidence, in the form of emails between rating execs, emails between the agencies and underwriters and deposition testimony from credit rating agency insiders. The only hard evidence on the agency’s role in the economy’s collapse came from a Senate report.

Until Monday.

In a series of filings in federal court in Manhattan, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and its lawyers at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd disclosed thousands of pages of internal communications and deposition transcripts to back their claims that S&P and Moody’s are liable for fraud and negligent misrepresentation in connection with their rating of a structured investment vehicle underwritten by Morgan Stanley. Based on a declaration by plaintiffs that accompanied the documents, a huge percentage of the newly disclosed material has never previously been seen by the public – and a good many of the documents deal not just with the Morgan Stanley SIV but more broadly with the rating process inside S&P and Moody’s at a time when the two leading agencies were swamped with mortgage-backed securities to rate.

Robbins Geller also provided a helpful CliffsNotes version of the evidence in the form of an unredacted response to the defendants’ motion for summary judgment. (A redacted version was filed in February, with page upon page blacked out.) This is a hot filing. Abu Dhabi quotes deposition testimony from “S&P’s most senior quantitative analyst in Europe,” for instance, that says “the ratings of [the SIVs] were inappropriate because the ratings of the underlying assets were not appropriate. So it leads to the conclusion that they should not have been rated.” In other snippets quoted in the filing, rating agency analysts complained about “difficulties in explaining HOW we got to these numbers since there is no science behind it” and about “[making] up haircuts that were palatable to SIV issuers.”

A lead S&P analyst on the deal, according to the plaintiffs, said in an email to his boss that the default rates the agency was using for asset-backed securities were guesswork. “From looking at the numbers it is obvious that we have just stuck our preverbal [sic] finger in the air,” the analyst wrote.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal called Bank of America’s 2008 acquisition of the tottering mortgage giant Countrywide a $40 billion mistake. Sure, the bank only paid a total of $4.5 billion to pick up Countrywide, paying $2 billion for a minority stake in 2007 and an additional $2.5 billion for the rest of the company in 2008. BofA had its eye on Countrywide’s then-profitable mortgage servicing business, but since the acquisition Countrywide and its deficient mortgages have been pretty much nothing but trouble for Bank of America, which has seen its share price drop 68 percent and is still digesting what the Journal estimated to be at least $40 billion in “total real estate losses, settlements with government agencies and amounts pledged to investors who purchased poor-performing Countrywide mortgage-backed securities.” The Journal‘s Dan Fitzpatrick quoted a North Carolina banking professor who called BofA’s Countrywide acquisition “the worst deal in the history of American finance.”

Ouch. But thanks to a New York appeals court, BofA may have just put a fence around one big swath of Countrywide liability. On Thursday the Appellate Division, First Department, upheld Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Barbara’s Kapnick‘s ruling that the mortgage-backed securities investor Walnut Place may not proceed with a breach of contract case against Countrywide. That ruling will severely limit the options for Walnut and the other investors who have objected to Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion global settlement with Countrywide MBS noteholders. It also puts the focus in the litigation over the global settlement on Bank of New York Mellon and its conduct as Countrywide’s MBS trustee, which Kapnick is also overseeing. My prediction: Unless Kapnick finds that BNY Mellon didn’t fulfill its duties as trustee in reaching that settlement, Countrywide MBS investors can’t sue outside of the deal.

And here’s why. MBS pooling and servicing contracts, you’ll recall, make it exceedingly difficult for noteholders to bring claims that underlying loans breached representations and warranties by mortgage issuers like Countrywide. Under standard PSA terms, investors can’t take any action unless they’ve amassed support from noteholders with 25 percent of the voting rights in a particular MBS trust. If they manage to get over that procedural hurdle, they must then demand an investigation of reps and warranties breaches from the MBS trustee and then wait months for the trustee to respond. Only if the MBS trustee fails to take action on their behalf can investors bring their own breach of contract or put-back suit.

A filing late Monday confirmed what I reported last month: Merrill Lynch has agreed to a $315 million settlement of a securities class action stemming from 18 Merrill mortgage-backed note offerings. This agreement is the fourth MBS securities settlement, following this summer’s landmark $125 million Wells Fargo class action deal and a pair of settlements with Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, totaling $165.5 million, that National Credit Union Agency reached in November. The Merrill agreement, negotiated by lead class counsel at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, is by far the biggest score so far for MBS investors in a securities suit (as opposed to contract, or put-back, litigation).

There are dozens more MBS securities suits out there, as the Merrill settlement agreement acknowledges: the deal carves out claims by AIG, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and other MBS investors that have already filed their own securities suits against Merrill Lynch. But one of the big mysteries of the MBS securities litigation has been how to value the cases, since there’s so little precedent in the way of settlements. The NCUA deals helped; the credit-union regulator repackaged and resold mortgage-backed securities belonging to five failed credit unions, so the agency actually knew how much the credit unions lost through their MBS investments. In its talks with Citi and Deutsche Bank (which the agency didn’t formally sue), NCUA was able to claim specific, fact-based damages.

The Merrill settlement documents provide significantly more insight for plaintiffs who don’t have the luxury of U.S. government backing to sell repackaged mortgage-backed securities. The documents don’t disclose the class’s specific damages claim; the case settled before investors filed their damages expert’s report. But the exhibits included along with the settlement brief indicate a methodology for calculating damages that other plaintiffs can use. MBS defendants, including Merrill Lynch, will undoubtedly continue to assert that MBS noteholders shouldn’t recover anything for their securities claims because they’re sophisticated investors who knew the riskiness of mortgage-backed notes. But as hundred-million-dollar settlements pile up, that’s a tougher argument to sell.

In 1998, 400 investors in a trust that distributed revenue from a communications satellite got word that their securitization trustee had settled a $41 million suit against the satellite’s fuel supplier. The trustee, IBJ Schroeder, filed a New York State Article 77 proceeding to obtain a judge’s endorsement of the $8.5 million settlement. Some of the investors protested the deal, arguing that the trustee didn’t have the power to settle the case without consulting them. In 2000, a New York appeals court ruled that, in fact, IBJ Schroeder did have that power, under both New York law and the contract governing the satellite revenue trust. The lower court ultimately ruled in the Article 77 case that even if investors considered the settlement amount too low, Schroeder hadn’t acted unreasonably or imprudently in striking the deal.

If you’re wondering why I’m telling you about an 11-year old ruling involving a defunct communications satellite, it’s because the IBJ Schroeder opinion is sure to be invoked by Bank of New York Mellon, the trustee of those Countrywide mortgage-backed securities, as well as the 22 Countrywide MBS investors represented by Gibbs & Bruns as they appeal last week’s decision by U.S. District Judge William Pauley III of Manhattan federal court. In holding that the federal courts have jurisdiction over Bank of America’s proposed $8.5 billion settlement, Pauley took issue with BNY Mellon’s use of an Article 77 proceeding to get the deal approved. The judge wrote that Article 77 is usually employed to resolve garden-variety trust administration issues; BNY Mellon and Gibbs & Bruns will use the IBJ Schroeder ruling to argue at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that, contrary to Pauley’s assertion, there’s precedent for using Article 77 exactly as they did in the BofA MBS case.

But even as the Second Circuit decides whether to take up the issue of the rights and responsibilities of securitization trustees, state attorneys general are likely to pounce upon some of the language in Pauley’s 21-page ruling. I warned that there might be unintended consequences for indentured trustees when the judge asked for briefing on the BNY Mellon’s duties. After Pauley’s ruling, that warning is now a red alert. New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman and his faithful follower, Joseph Biden III of Delaware, have both announced that they’re investigating MBS securitization trustees. Schneiderman showed he’s serious by filing state-law fraud claims against BNY Mellon along with his petition to intervene in the BofA Article 77 proceeding. In his complaint against BNY, Schneiderman argued that once an investment goes south, as many of the MBS trusts have, the indentured trustee has a fiduciary duty to trust beneficiaries under New York common law.