Bankruptcy Information

Former Florida mortgage lender Lee Farkas, the government’s biggest criminal conviction of the financial crisis, wants a retrial.

Lawyers for Farkas, who was sentenced last June for orchestrating a multibillion-dollar fraud, say a federal court’s “rush to judgment” violated his rights to a fair trial.  His lawyers also say a federal judge erred by instructing a jury its sole interest was to seek the truth without allowing further definition of “reasonable doubt.”  Read his brief here.

Farkas, whom federal prosecutors described as a “consummate fraudster,” was sentenced to 30 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of misappropriating about $3 billion and trying to fraudulently obtain more than $550 million from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program in a failed effort to prop up Colonial Bank. The seven-year fraud

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Tags: Lee Farkas, Retrial

 I have had two different clients during this past month who were anticipating civil suits by two separate U.S. government agencies for their alleged violation of agency regulations. Both clients were W-2 employees and both clients supported people in their respective families. Both clients were “head of household” for purposes of Florida’s wage garnishment statutes. Both clients expected that  would be exempt from wage garnishment under Florida law. 

  There is a federal statute which overrides Florida’s wage garnishment statute when the creditor is a U.S. government. The statute says that notwithstanding any provision of a State law, when an individual owes money other than taxes  to an executive, judicial or legislative agency that agency may garnish up to 15% of that debtor’s wages. There is an exception when the debtor has been unemployed during the previous year. The statute is Title 31, Subchapter 2, Section 3720D.  

In addition, a  person who violates U.S. agency regulations is often subject to criminal liability as well as civil money damages. The government h

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Tags: Government

In 2011, personal bankruptcy filings in South Florida decreased for the first time since 2007.

In Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Broward counties, 34,492 individuals filed for bankruptcy protection last year.  In 2010, 38,000 people filed for bankruptcy in the tri-county region.

Last month, 2,470 bankruptcies were filed in South Florida–a month-to-month decrease of 9 percent.

Bankruptcy analysts believe that last year’s decrease in bankruptcy filings in South Florida was caused by high unemployment and slowed foreclosure processes by banks.

Across the country, personal bankruptcy filings decreased by 12 percent in 2011.  Last year, about 1 in every 175 people in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy.

Tags: 2011, Florida Decrease, South Florida, South Florida Decrease

For the last few years, I have witnessed a steady stream of homeowners flowing through my office who are dumbfounded by their inability to get a mortgage modification.  And for years, I have been telling them all the same thing:

YOUR SERVICER DOESN’T WANT TO MODIFY YOUR LOAN!

The truth of the matter is that, of all the options available to a mortgage servicer to deal with a distressed homeowner, mortgage modification is the least desirable for the servicer of your loan.

This phenomenon is discussed at length in a recent Washington Law Review article by attorney Diane E. Thompson entitled Foreclosing Modifications: How Servicer Incentives Discourage Loan Modifications, 86 WashLRev 755 (© 2011).  Ms. Thompson, who is Of Counsel at the National Consumer Law Center, adeptly dissects the servicer’s incentive to foreclose rather than modify a mortgage.  She concludes:

The financial compensation and constraints imposed on and chosen by servicers generally lead servicers to prefer refinancing, foreclosures, and short-term repayment plans to modifications. Service

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A vending machine sale will give you a clear picture of the wide range of vending machines with which you can start your own profitable home based business. There are many distributors of vending machines and bulk vending products that will supply you with all the information you need regarding prices of machines and the bulk products you need to restock them. While candy and food service vending machines are the most common, there are many more types of vending machines you can use to turn a profit. It is only when you attend a vending machine sale that you get the overall picture of how this business works.

You don’t have to spend time searching the classifieds to find a vending machine sale near you. A simple online search will net you thousands of results for distributors of bulk vending products and the machines that sell them. The distributors have all kinds of vending machines, both new and used, so you can search for the cheapest machines in the line of products that you want to sell. G

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Tags: Machine Sale, Sale, Vending Machine, Vending Machine Sale