MNB Moves to Sanction Terminella
by June 30, 2008 12:00 am 72 views
It happened after we’d put our cover story to bed on Metropolitan National Bank’s agreement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, so we’ll report it here.
Four days after Tom Terminella released a statement blasting MNB and a day after MNB CEO Lunsford Bridges fired back, Metropolitan filed a motion asking for sanctions against Terminella for his comments on June 24.
Regular readers know the details by now. Terminella sued MNB for $50 million last year, a month after it foreclosed on two loans totaling around $14 million, and it has been a bitter battle ever since.
Terminella has accused MNB of wrongfully calling his note in an effort to take control of his property.
MNB has all but accused Terminella’s attorneys of abusing a pregnant woman (loan officer Susan Slinkard) and the elderly (MNB majority owner Doyle Rogers Sr.).
In January, Washington County Circuit Court judge Kim Smith stopped short of issuing a gag order requested by MNB while ordering the deposition of Slinkard placed under seal after it was filed by Terminella’s attorneys as an exhibit to a motion.
The bone of contention now relates to a protective order agreed upon by both sides on May 5. In it, the sides agree not to disclose the sensitive financial information obtained from other banks in the discovery phase. There is also a clause to “ensure … that extrajudicial statements are not made by the parties or their attorneys that would be prejudicial to the litigation of this case.”
According to Merriam Webster online, “extrajudicial” is defined as “delivered without legal authority.”
Bridges tried to make that point in his response to Terminella, castigating him for connecting the dots between the OCC’s finding of “unsafe and unsound” practices and his allegations made against MNB.
Terminella’s accusations were certainly nothing new. The crux of his case relates to proving MNB engaged in bad banking with him as its unwitting victim. But the MNB motion left us wondering: If no one is supposed to say anything, then did Bridges violate the same order by making a statement of his own?