“It’s a very unusual thing for borrowers to take out huge sums of money to be able to borrow money,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Howard W. Foster said about the Utah lawsuit. “It’s backwards; you have to put up a ton of money in order to borrow money. I’ve never heard of anything like that. It’s not going to stop until the court steps in.”
The managing partner of commercial litigation firm Messner Reeves’ Utah office has been named in two federal lawsuits accusing him of racketeering for allegedly stealing more than $10 million in escrow deposits from borrowers who made deposits to “a sham lender” without regulatory approval to issue loans.
Torben M. Welch, the managing partner at Messner Reeves in Salt Lake City, was identified in suits filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. In both suits, borrowers claimed that they deposited funds into escrow in Messner’s trust account for loans from a shell Wyoming company, INBE Capital Group.
