Bank of New York Mellon v. Mangiafico

Citations

• 198 Conn. App. 722

Syllabus

The plaintiff bank sought to foreclose a mortgage on certain real property owned by the defendant M, following M's failure to make any payment on the note for a period of more than eight years. The trial court granted the plaintiff's motion for summary judgment as to liability only and rendered a judgment of strict foreclosure, from which M appealed. On appeal, M claimed that the trial court erred in granting the plaintiff's motion for summary judgment because the action was time barred by statute (§ 42a-3-188) and the court failed to consider his special defense that the plaintiff engaged in inequitable conduct. Held: 1. M's claim that the limitation period in § 42a-3-118 barred the foreclosure action was unavailing; the statute, which required that any action to enforce the underlying debt represented by a note must be initiated within six years after the accelerated due date in the note, applies only to the enforcement of a note and did not bar a mortgage foreclosure action on the same debt, and this court declined to overrule precedential case law defining the note and the mortgage as separate instruments and actions for foreclosure of the mortgage and upon the note as distinct causes of action. 2. The trial court properly rejected the viability of M's special defense that the plaintiff engaged in inequitable conduct: M failed to sufficiently allege a valid defense or otherwise meet his burden of proving the facts alleged in his special defense, as his support of his defense consisted only of an affidavit providing merely conclusory statements that did not go to the making, validity or enforcement of the mortgage, and the court properly refused to consider M's testimony at the summary judgment hearing; moreover, M's attempted reliance on appeal on findings in the foreclosure mediator's final report was unavailing, as neither party had submitted the report to the trial court for its consideration in the sum- mary judgment context and, thus, this court did not con