After being hit with a barrage of lawsuits from angry borrowers and shareholders, Coast Bank of Florida has fired its own legal salvo against a mortgage company it says failed to purchase more than $20 million in construction loans.
The suit, filed in Manatee County Circuit Court on June 14 and moved to Middle District Federal Court in Tampa, alleges that Delaware-based Opteum Financial Services LLC failed to purchase the loans from Coast Bank as it agreed to under contract.
Coast Bank is seeking damages in excess of $15,000 for the 51 outstanding loans that Opteum failed to acquire.
"Opteum underwrote those loans and gave an unconditional commitment to purchase those loans once the construction was completed," said Tramm Hudson, a spokesman for Coast Bank. "And they failed to do so and we are suing them to enforce our rights under the commitment."
Opteum officials and their attorney did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.
A lawsuit represents only one side of a dispute.
The loan package with Opteum was put together by Phil Coon, Coast Bank's former executive vice president of retail lending, Tramm confirmed.
Coon, who was fired by Coast Bank earlier this year, was at the center of loans made to 482 borrowers whose homes were built by bankrupted builder Construction Compliance Inc. The $110 million in problem loans to mostly investor borrowers have sent the stock of Coast Bank's parent company, Coast Financial Holdings Inc., plummeting and put the bank in a position that it may have to be sold.
Shareholders have also filed suit against Coast Financial Holdings.
None of the homes in the Opteum deal were built by CCI, Hudson said. "There are four or five other builders," Hudson said. "Baywood (Construction) was one of them and I can't remember the others."
Meanwhile, Sarasota attorney Alan Tannenbaum, who has already filed roughly 125 lawsuits against Coast Bank on behalf of investors, said he is preparing to file at least another 25.
"There are additional suits that are in preparation that involve Coast Bank with other builders including Enchanted, Advantage and Heritage Homes," Tannenbaum said. "They're all Charlotte and Lee County builders and these cases are going to be filed in Charlotte and Lee County."
Investors in the Enchanted-built homes have complained that the houses were priced too high to sell once they came on the market, Tannenbaum said.
Enchanted owner Tom Gillespie did not immediately reply to an e-mail seeking comment.
In March, Gillespie told the Bradenton Herald that the prices of the homes weren't high, given the booming real estate market at the time the homes were sold.
"It wasn't a guarantee. It was an investment," he said at the time. "Now that the market hasn't gone the way everybody thought it was, now they want to come and say someone's done something crooked."
Officials with Advantage did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
The suits Tannenbaum has already filed seek to have the Coast Bank loans forgiven, and allege that the bank should have known CCI was insolvent and couldn't complete the homes.
Tannenbaum said attempts to negotiate satisfactory adjustments of the mortgages have been unsuccessful.
"They (Coast Bank) have been making some deals with people but we just feel that they're not able to go far enough in their mortgage modifications to satisfy our client group," Tannenbaum said. "It's not because they're not admitting their culpability, it's just that there's a point at which if they adjust the mortgages too far, their capitalization will be so weak that they'll almost cease to exist."
E-Mail
Print
@Nyx.CommentBody@