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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Wrong Venue for Suit Over ‘Loan Gone Awry’

(CN) - A real estate developer whose bank failed while still owing millions on a loan filed suit in the wrong venue, the 9th Circuit ruled Monday.

Arkansas-based ANB Financial agreed in 2007 to loan MTB Enterprises $17 million so that it could develop a real estate parcel called Sundance Ranch in Canyon County, Idaho.

The project "was left to languish" a year later, however, after "ANB balked on honoring the final $6 million in payouts and thereafter failed as a financial institution," according to the decision Monday from an appellate panel in Seattle.

ADC Venture inherited ANB's assets, including the MTB construction loan, from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and soon found itself the lone target of a federal civil complaint by MTB in Idaho.

With the trial court finding that ADC never assumed of liability stemming from the 2007 loan, the 9th Circuit tossed MTB's appeal Monday for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction.

The eight-page decision notes that MTB had two choices, under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, of where to file its federal complaint: in Western Arkansas, where the failed bank ANB was located, or in Washington, D.C.

Judge Margaret McKeown wrote the decision for the three-judge panel.

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