NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts — Bankers’ hands were strengthened this week thanks to a ruling by the state Supreme Judicial Court in a local bankruptcy case
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Missing signatures on one of the many pages in the mortgage documents for a local couple buying a house in 2005 became a contested issue when Alvaro and Lisa Pereira filed for bankruptcy in July 2012.
That was six months after the error was discovered, according to attorney Raymond Quintin, who handled the original mortgage closing for Bank of America Corp.
Quintin filed an affidavit testifying that the couple were indeed present during the closing, and that he duly filed the mortgage with the Registry of Deeds.
The question was whether the missing signature was a mistake egregious enough to void the mortgage, and the law was being tested by bankruptcy trustee Debora A. Casey, who was challenging the validity of the BofA mortgage of $240,000.
Had she prevailed, the couple would have avoided the mortgage altogether.
Lower courts ruled back and forth.
Thursday, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of the bank and against the trustee, declaring that the original mistake was “cured” by the affidavit.
Quintin told The Standard-Times that the ruling sets a fairly narrow precedent for such errors, mainly because the parties involved may dispute the facts, which were not in question here.
The ruling was essentially about whether Quintin had adequately corrected the problem, and the court said he had.
