Bulletin: FL000014

Dear Associates:

The matter of the enforceability of various documents filed on the public record concerning solar water heaters continues to be a problem to the title industry.

There is a case pending in Pinellas County brought by the State Attorney General's office. There is a case in Miami which has just been certified to become a class action suit which might ultimately resolve the entire problem but the case just having been formulated as a class action suit, it is probably two years from a resolution.

I was recently informed by an attorney handling one such case that Worldwide Collections is now in Bankruptcy Court in Nevada. If this be so, we may expect the problem to get worse before it gets better because the Trustee in Bankruptcy will potentially have a sense of duty to the creditors in his bankruptcy case to try to collect all of the possible assets of Worldwide.

It is my understanding that Nationwide's matters were all assigned to Worldwide but I cannot be certain of this because there is so much confusion in this area.

You are cautioned to continue to handle these matters with great care. If there is an instrument on the public record that can reasonably be identified as a lien upon real property and it is in the name of Nationwide, Magna Card, Consumer Finance, Worldwide or any other name, you are required to treat it as a lien and get it paid off and satisfied. We cannot afford to have these as claims nor can we afford the legal defense to eliminate them.