Entrepreneurial Inmate Loses Lawsuit

by: Peter J. Gallagher (@pjsgallagher) (LinkedIn)

While pro se lawsuits by prisoners are not unusual, you don't see ones like Tormasi v. Hayman every day.

In Tormasi, plaintiff sued several officials from the prison in which he was serving a life sentence. In the lawsuit, he claimed that they improperly seized his intellectual property assets and corporate records. As the Appellate Division explained: "During his incarceration, plaintiff acquired various intellectual property assets, which he assigned to Advanced Data Solutions Corporation (ADS) in exchange for sole ownership of the corporation." At some point during his incarceration, prison officials seized plaintiff's personal property, including: "1) miscellaneous corporate paperwork related to ADS . . 2) patent-prosecution documents; 3) an unfiled provisional patent application; 4) several floppy diskettes; and 5) various legal correspondence." Plaintiff sued in federal court, asserting a claim under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, various federal civil rights claims, and a state law claim for inverse condemnation.

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Transfer Can Be Fraudulent Even If It Occurs Before Loan, Default, And Lawsuit Over Default On Loan

A recent Appellate Division decision should serve as a warning to anyone thinking about transferring assets and rendering themselves judgment proof before entering into a business deal. If the deal goes bad, the transfer might be deemed fraudulent and creditors might be able to look to the fraudulently transferred assets to satisfy their judgments.

In Anastasi v. Barmbatsis, defendants, husband and wife, held all of the shares in a single-purpose entity that owned and operated a Stewart's Root Beer in Franklin Park, New Jersey. Shortly before procuring a loan to open a new Stewart's location with a partner, husband transferred his interest in the entity to wife, along with nearly all of his interest in another entity that the two owned. Husband then entered into a deal with plaintiff — verbal, but "apparently sealed with a handshake" — to borrow $50,000 to use to open the new restaurant. Defendants used this money, along with other funds, to open the restaurant.

Husband agreed to repay the loan in five to seven months. This was subsequently extended but husband failed to repay the loan even with the extension. Plaintiff sued and obtained a default judgment against husband for $50,000. In post-judgment discovery, plaintiff learned about the pre-loan transfers from husband to wife. Thereafter, he sued both husband and wife alleging, among other things, that the transfers violated New Jersey's Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act (the "UFTA"). The trial court ruled in plaintiff's favor. It held that wife was not personally responsible for paying back the loan, but plaintiff could satisfy his judgment with the interests in the two entities that husband had transferred to wife.

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Enforcement Action Against Rating Agency Allowed To Proceed

by: Peter J. Gallagher (@pjsgallagher)

In an interesting decision issued today, Judge Katz (Essex County) denied a motion to dismiss filed by the ratings agency Standard & Poor's ("S&P") in an enforcement action brought against S&P by the New Jersey Attorney General. In Hoffman v. McGraw-Hill Financial, Inc., the Attorney General alleged that S&P violated the Consumer Fraud Act ("CFA") by misrepresenting to New Jersey consumers that S&P's analysis and rating of structured finance securities was independent and objective. The opinion contains decisions on both procedural personal jurisdiction issues and substantive CFA issues that all litigators should find interesting.

[Lawsuits against ratings agencies are nothing new. Several years ago, I wrote an article about these lawsuits and, at the time, the relative success the rating agencies had defending against them. (If you did not save your copy of the article, click here for another copy.) Historically, the rating agencies argued that their ratings were proetced under the First Amendment, but at least one court rejected this argument in the context of a motion to dismiss in a lawsuit that eventually settled.]

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Not A Holder In Due Course? Not Necessarily A Standing Problem

by: Peter J. Gallagher

By now, all lenders have likely been faced with at least one situation where a borrower alleges that the lender lacked standing to sue on a note because the lender was not the holder of the note. While New Jersey courts have largely eliminated this defense, at least in the post-judgment context (see here), a recent decision from the Appellate Division reminds us that a lender can have standing to sue even when it is not a holder in due course.

In Lynx Asset Services, LLC v. Simon Zarour, National City Bank loaned defendant $190,000, and defendant executed a mortgage as security for the note. Thereafter, National City merged with PNC Bank. Sometime later, PNC Bank delivered the original note to Lynx Asset Services, LLC and issued an assignment of the note and mortgage, but did not indorse the assignment. Defendant eventually defaulted on the note and Lynx sued. Defendant admitted that he signed the note and mortgage and that he had stopped paying on the note. He nonetheless argued that Lynx lacked standing to sue because it did not have a signed assignment. The trial court rejected this claim, and the Appellate Division affirmed, holding that, although Lynx was not a holder in due course, it nonetheless had standing to sue on the note because it was a non-holder with the rights of a holder.

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