Friday, September 17, 2010

Bank Forecloses On Durham's Geist Mansion

The IBJ's Greg Andrews reports on a foreclosure action brought against alleged Ponzi scheme operator Tim Durham on his palatial Geist estate.

JPMorgan Chase has slapped embattled financier Tim Durham with a mortgage-foreclosure suit, and is asking a court to order his Geist mansion sold through a sheriff’s sale.


The New York-based banking company said Durham stopped making payments this spring on a $3.5 million mortgage he took out in 2007. Because the mortgage runs 30 years, Durham had barely made a dent in the principal, despite required monthly payments of $18,329.

The suit, filed in Hamilton County last month, represents another setback for the Ohio bankruptcy trustee trying to scrape together assets for investors in Akron-based Fair Finance Co., the Durham-owned company that collapsed last year, in large part because of massive loans to Durham and other insiders.
Andrews reports Shelby County Bank also had a $1.9 million lien on the property as collateral for a line of credit it extended to Durham. Essentially, Durham has no equity in the home because the outstanding mortgages total as much as the listing price for the home, $5.5 million. According to bankruptcy trustee for Fair Finance Company, the Ohio company Durham plundered, investors only hope for recovery comes from a collection of expensive cars and artwork owned by Durham that have been turned over to the bankruptcy trustee for auction. Ohio investors lost about $200 million in the now-bankrupt company that loaned out most of the money they invested with the company to Durham and companies he controlled. Although federal investigators accused Durham late last year of operating a Ponzi scheme, there have been no criminal charges brought against him to date as the one-year anniversary of the FBI raid on his offices nears.

1 comment:

Marycatherine Barton said...

Re Hoosiers in debt, the "Business Insider" website, lists what it calls the ten states with soaring poverty rates, that the government does not want you to know, and number nine on that list is, Indiana.