McCollum
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Legal Newsline) - Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced on Tuesday that he has sent letters to several prominent mortgage lenders requesting meetings to discuss their foreclosure processes.
The letters were sent to Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, GMAC, PNC Financial Group and Litton Loan.
In light of the recent admittance by several lenders that they were rubberstamping foreclosures, McCollum wants to discuss ways to promptly and effectively redeem the integrity of the foreclosure process.
"I was depressed to learn from media reports that your company may have engaged in filing faulty affidavits in foreclosure cases in Florida courts with regard to ownership of promissory notes and affidavits that attested to personal knowledge of facts when, in fact, the affiant had no such personal knowledge," McCollum wrote in the letters.
"The net effect of these actions, among other things, has been to cast a shadow on the title to these properties which is of such proportions that at least one major title company is now refusing to write title insurance on foreclosed properties."
McCollum has asked each company to come to Tallahassee to meet with him and discuss ways to restore the marketability of real estate titles in the state of Florida.
"I realize that correcting the faulty affidavits and reopening many of the foreclosure cases may take many months, even years given the state of our overburdened court system," McCollum wrote.
"Florida cannot wait that long to correct the linchpin of our economic recovery-clearing the foreclosure backlog."