Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. won dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Minnesota’s Ramsey and Hennepin counties over claims the use of MERS to avoid paying mortgage-assignment filing fees violates state law, Bloomberg News reported today. U.S. District Judge David S. Doty in Minneapolis threw out the counties’ complaint today, ruling that state law doesn’t require all transactions be recorded and only mandates what happens if they aren’t. The applicable law says in part, “every conveyance of real estate shall be recorded in the office of the county recorder of the county where such real estate is situated; and every such conveyance not so recorded shall be void as against any subsequent purchaser in good faith and for a valuable consideration of the same real estate, or any part thereof, whose conveyance is first duly recorded.” “Nothing in the statute suggests — either through text or punctuation — that the phrase shall be recorded is to be divorced from the surrounding text,” the judge said. MERS, a unit of co-defendant Merscorp Holdings Inc., files mortgages as the lenders’ assignees or nominees to eliminate the need to record assignments of the notes securing those loans when they’re sold. Ramsey County, home of Minnesota’s capital city of St. Paul, and Hennepin county, site of the state’s most populous city, Minneapolis, filed the lawsuit in February on behalf of all the state’s counties. They alleged the failure to make those assignments public created a public nuisance by concealing the identity of those who holding a financial stake in a property and deprived the counties of filing fees for each transaction of about $46.
