Banking Law

A Bank Lawyer's Blog favorite, former Colorado Deputy Insurance Commissioner Erin Toll, a woman who apparently never met a camera lens she didn't fall in love with (and vice versa, to be perfectly honest), recently was permanently "disengaged" from her position as Director of Real Estate in Colorado over a dust-up with a state legislator and her own boss. She claimed that she was being punished by her (now former) boss for being a whistle blower for launching an investigation into the alleged activities of a state legislator she was (or was not) investigating. The boss denied that allegation. Apparently, Ms. Toll told the press that she was investigating the legislator and his mortgage brokerage firm after she and the legislator clashed privately and at a public hearing over her department's track record of regulation of mortgage brokers in Colorado. The Department of Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the Department of Real Estate that Ms. Toll headed, publicly stated that the legislator was never under investigation and put Ms. Toll on paid leave in March of this year. The Denver Post obtained records that it claimed showed that the investigation into the legislator's company was opened the day after Ms. Toll announced it to the press. Ms. Toll hired a lawyer who specialized in employment issues involving public employees, the state's and Ms. Toll's representatives negotiated behind the scenes. The parties recently reached a "confidential settlement" and Ms. Toll resigned.

Pretty confusing, yet decidedly suspicious, circumstances, don't you think?

Critics of Ms. Toll in the mortgage brokerage community have complained about her for some time that she and her minions were abusive autocrats and that she was out to make a name for herself no matter how many human beings were trampled in the process. In other words, Eliot Spitzer on a Rocky Mountain High. Former Colorado Governor Bill Owens described her as an "unguided missile that always sought the headline." Ms. Toll's supporters, on the other hand, complained that she did just what she was hired to do: be a tough regulator of a business with a shoddy reputation, and that a legislator who has a business interest in a mortgage brokerage company ought not to be in a position to participate in committee hearings nor to engage in "private meetings" that involve Ms. Toll where his tongue-lashings could be construed as blatant attempts to intimidate her. With the confidential settlement, the public will never get to the bottom the issue, will it?

The comments section of the Denver Post article linked above certainly indicates that people are picking sides with equal parts cynicism and outright rage. I can't say I blame them. Having been on the receiving end of power-abusing regulators at both the state and federal levels who considered all those who disagreed with them to be enemies of the motherland, and having witnessed the pathetic lack of moral principles possessed by so many professional politicians, I can honestly say that I think that a pox on all their houses would be a fitting curse. As I observed in an earlier post in which I defended Ms.Toll, if you get into a game of rolling around in the mud with pigs, it can't come as a shock to anyone, including yourself, that you end up soiled.

The take-away smile from the incident has to be Ms. Toll's parting application of lip gloss to the pig she's riding into the sunset. 

"I'm looking forward to starting a new career. I've always wanted to sell real estate."

As one commenter put it so well: "Especially during the worst market in DECADES."

Nice try, Erin, but we're not buying the happy ending, either.