First, it does not contain any impermissibly stigmatic statements; instead, it appears based on FDIC’s permissible concerns regarding a particular payday lender’s business practices. Rather than being evidence of a broader campaign against payday lenders, it appears to be evidence of a targeted enforcement action against a single scofflaw. Select Love Letter.
Struggling to gather head evidence of the current presence of it so-called pressure venture, Plaintiffs suggest other comments – such as for example agencies recommendations files and you can internal department letters – as the circumstantial evidence of instance a strategy. This new Judge finds out this type of comments becoming too little and you may too equivocal so you’re able to persuasively present that including a venture resided.
Plaintiffs and additionally you will need to reveal that that it strategy is available by pointing about what it define because the an enthusiastic “unmatched trend off bank terminations from dating with payday lenders” while it began with 2013
Many of these statements were non-public and made internally within the relevant agency, and thus could not have caused any stigma. See Opp’n to Advance America’s Mot. at 28-30. Under Plaintiffs’ own theory, Federal Defendants’ pressure campaign took place in the “backroom.” Thus, it was those backroom efforts to pressure banks into terminating relationships with payday lenders, not these widely-disseminated public statements, that caused the complained of terminations. Thus, these statements are at best circumstantial evidence of a backroom pressure campaign.
New Plaintiffs’ Reply at 14 (internal citations and quotation marks omitted). Plaintiffs’ submissions identify the many terminations they have experienced firsthand, and Plaintiffs’ expert, having reviewed these submissions and other evidence, has concluded that this “wave” could only have been caused by a pressure campaign orchestrated by Federal Defendants. Read more