A court in New Jersey in the US has hammered a giant nail in the coffin of banks involved in securitisation. An attorney specialising in home loan foreclosure and securitisation in SA says the case should be liberally quoted in our local courts where banks are attempting to foreclose without the original documents. The website Living Lies explains the importance of this recent decision.

The fallout from the 2008 subprime crisis continues to rattle on down the ages. This time, a US law suit involving Barclays shows how employees knew the mortgages they were underwriting were bad, yet continued to securitise them. 

Here's a bit of Christmas cheer: in a year when there were some notable victories for the small guy standing up to bullying banks, Cape Town couple Ahdill Abrahams and his wife Zulfa delivered the coup de gras on which to end the year. The couple have been fighting a 10 year war to prove that FNB had securitised their loan. Here's how they did it. 

Absa's attempt to obtain summary judgment against Cape Town's Greg Smith was summarily thrown out of court last Friday. Ironically, Smith spent much of his life working on advertising campaigns for various banks. What's fairly unique about this one is Smith specifically accused the bank of securitising his loan. While the judge didn't address this, he did not like that Absa turned up in court with recreated documents instead of the originals.

Document storage company Docufile is being summonsed to court to explain what happened in the fire of 2009 when possibly hundreds of thousands of documents, many of them mortgage bonds, were destroyed. Docufile's parent company, Iron Mountain, has had its own share of bad luck with fires, raising suspicions at least some of these were deliberate. 

The Northern Irish courts are quietly setting international precedent when it comes to securitisation and "double dipping" by the banks. Notice in this report how Santander Bank "destroyed" documents relevant to a claim being brought by the bank (just as Absa claims thousands of its documents were "destroyed" in a fire in 2009 so as to avoid presenting the originals in court). But in the Northern Irish case, the home owner moved to commit the CEO of Santander Bank and his "corrupt" officials and lawyers to prison for submitting a false claim toi the court.

What happened to Lisa Epstein in the US echoes the experience of thousands of South Africans faced with foreclosure - fuzzy legal language, missing documents and a simple strategy of bankruptiung their clients by dragging out legal arguments. Lisa studied up securitisation on her own, read the small print, and finally beat the bank. Here's what happened. 

Goldman Sachs got slapped with a $5bn fine for selling worthless pieces of paper called subprime mortgages. But as this story from Newrepublic.com makes clear, the victims who lost their houses over this fraud will get little of the cash. The lawyers, the Treasury and the Justice department are the main winners. Goldman Sachs will only pay out roughly $2bn, which is a fraction of the money the bank made from securitisation transactions during the financial crisis leading up to 2008.

A recent decision by a California court opens the door for homeowners who were wrongfully dispossessed of their homes to pursue legal action against banks, even if they were in default, according to the LA Times.

A recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal reveals that precious little of the $110 billion in damages awarded against banks for mortgage fraud and irregularities did not go to the 6m homeowners who lost their properties. Most of it went to the Treasury. 

In the second part of this series on securitisation, Jack Darier delves deep into the lies and deception that have allowed the banks to repossess upwards of 10,000 homes a year in SA. In this instalment, he explains to get obtain information on securitisation.

In the first of this two-part article, Jack Darier delves into the murky world of securitisation, and how banks are able to side-step the law in grabbing the homes of upwards of 10,000 South Africans each year. It's all accomplished with legal trickery and the blessing of the courts.

Eastern Cape ostrich farmer Ash Davenport, who was the first South Africa to present a securitisation audit in front of a court, lost his case in the Eastern Cape High Court to stop his farm being sold in execution. But he has a second audit proving beyond any doubt that Standard Bank no longer owns his loan.   

Jack Darier of Parkhurst in Joburg asked his bank whether his loan had been securitised. No way, said the bank. It was the answer Darier was expecting. Meantime he had the proof that the opposite was true. It was a truth test, and the bank failed.

5 out of 5 securitisation audits so far concluded suggest the banks have been less than honest with their customers. In all five cases, the audits suggest the mortgage loans have ended up in Asia. 

Four out of four securitisation audits so far conducted in SA apparently prove that the home loans have ended up thousands of miles away in Asia. Yet the banks still cling to their argument that they are the lawful owners of the loans, according to Moneyweb.

An ostrich farmer from Grahamstown has thrown the local court into a spin by apparently proving that his mortgage loan with Standard Bank has been on-sold to an investor in Taiwan. This is the first time a securitisation audit has been presented in a SA court. On the basis of the evidence presented, the farmer says Standard Bank has no right to be in court.

A New York judge this week came out swinging against against two banks, Nomura Holdings and Royal Bank of Scotland, saying the banks’ misconduct exacerbated the collapse in the mortgage market, according to the New York Times.

A landmark securitisation case is headed for the Constitutional Court that will test the banks’ right to repossess homes where the mortgage bond has been ceded to a new owner. The Concourt is also being asked to decide whether going under debt review constitutes an act of insolvency.

Disgruntled bank customers are signing up for a class action suit against the banks after new evidence suggests banks are concealing their securitisation activities from customers, the courts and investors, in what could turn out to be the largest banking fraud in South African history. 

The Commercial Crimes Unit of the South African Police Services has asked for additional information relating to new evidence of securitisation fraud by the banks. As one expert comments, this could be the smoking gun pointing to the biggest banking fraud in SA history.