On September 11, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California denied a consumer lender and affiliated defendants’ Rule 60(b) motion seeking relief from a post-remand amended judgment in a decade-old tribal lending enforcement action brought by the CFPB. As previously covered by InfoBytes, the defendants moved to vacate the judgment in June, citing their satisfaction of the original approximately $10 million penalty, recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, abandoned settlement negotiations, and an internal CFPB memorandum that allegedly repudiated the enforcement posture underlying the case; the CFPB in August opposed the motion (covered here).

The court rejected each of the defendants’ arguments. Under Rule 60(b)(5), the court found the post-remand amended judgment had not been satisfied, that the judgment was not “prospective” because it only required monetary payment and no court supervision, and that the alleged intervening changes in law had either already been raised or could have been raised during the litigation. The court further found that abandoned settlement negotiations did not provide a basis for relief, and that attached documents refuted any claim that the parties had reached an agreement on terms. Turning to Rule 60(b)(6), the court concluded no “extraordinary circumstances” existed, noting the 9th Circuit had already addressed several of the defendants’ arguments in prior rulings — including that the court’s liability decision did not rely on Chevron deference and that the defendants had knowingly waived their jury trial right. The court characterized the motion as an “ill-conceived tactic designed to continue to delay” enforcement of the amended judgment.