Regardless of what the MERS proponents keep saying (i.e. there’s nothing wrong with MERS), more litigation keeps piling up. This time the litigation is local to Ohio. Here’s a snippet of a press release that has circulated the wires over the last few days:
“Bernstein Liebhard LLP, a New York City class litigation firm, with David P. Joyce, Prosecuting Attorney for Geauga County, Ohio, announced that a lawsuit has been filed in the Geauga County Court of Common Pleas by Plaintiff Geauga County, on behalf of itself and all other Ohio counties, (the “Class”) against MERSCORP, Inc., Mortgage Electronic Registration System, Inc. (“MERS”), and MERS’s members (collectively, “Defendants”).
In the class action complaint, Plaintiff Geauga County, on behalf of itself and all other Ohio counties, alleges violations of Ohio state law arising from Defendants’ failure to record intermediate mortgage assignments in, and pay the attendant county recording fees to, Ohio county recording offices. In failing to record, Defendants systematically broke chains of title throughout Ohio counties’ public land records by creating “gaps” due to missing mortgage assignments they failed to record, or by recording patently false and/or misleading mortgage assignments. Defendants’ purposeful failure to record has eviscerated the accuracy of Ohio counties’ public land records, rendering them unreliable and unverifiable — damage to public land records that may never be entirely remedied.
As a result, the Class seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, as well as damages, to remedy Defendants’ persistent, and purposeful, failure to comply with Ohio’s legal requirement to record mortgage assignments in the proper county recording office. In doing so, Defendants avoided paying the attendant county recording fees as required by Ohio state law. Ohio’s recording laws have been in place for nearly 200 years.
The case is captioned State of Ohio, ex rel. David P. Joyce Prosecuting Attorney of Geauga County, Ohio v. MERSCORP, Inc., et al., No. 11-M-001087.”
In response to the lawsuit, MERS representatives have stressed that there is nothing illegal or faulty about their registration system.
A copy of the complaint is now embedded below: