Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 14, Number 9, 1 Kepakemapa 1997 — lmperfect Title? Clients take title company to court [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

lmperfect Title? Clients take title company to court

by Paula Durbin Last year, when Perfect Title Company began challenging land title in Hawai'i under the laws of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a number of homeowners signed up for title searches. Now, in a eom-

plaint filed in circuit court on Aug. 4, some \ of them say they \ wound up on "a one- \ way street to utter \ financial ruin." Peter Riopta, Ivan Navarro, James Mupo, Samuel Fernandez, Lueila Aguilar, Edith Mar and Vena Quinto are all

plaintiffs in the classaction suit. At least one, Edith Mar, lost her home on the auehon block when her lenders foreclosed after

she stopped paying her u mortgage, allegedly due to Per-

fect Title's advice. Mar and the other plaintiffs want a jury to award them millions of dollars in damages. And they are asking the court for an injunction preventing the company, its president, Don

Lewis, and David Keanu Sai, whom Lewis appointed Regent of the Hawaiian Kingdom, from engaging in allegedly "unfair and deceptive practices, unjust enrichment, (and) false, untrue and misleading advertising." Although the plaintiffs are proceeding without

iegai representation, tneir eomplaint may have been drafted with an attorney's assistance. Plaintiff Riopta and the group's spokesperson, Richard Matsumoto, declined to comment about any legal assistance however. According to the eomplaint, the plaintiffs eaeh paid between $1,500 to $2,000 for searches tracing the ehain of ownership of their parcels. When Perfect Title pronounced their title defective, the eomplaint alleges, "Lewis and Sai

counseled and advised plaintiffs to stop making the payments on their mortgages." Don Lewis denied advising clients not to pay their mortgages but said, "When we find a title is not good, it affects any encumbrance or lien. That makes the mortgage instrument nonexistent." Perfect Title has in fact seen only one example of good title out of the 143 it says it has investigated since opening its doors. According to Lewis, the

laws of the Kingdom of ^ Hawai'i still apply, including the original requirements for taking title imposed by the reigning monarch at the time of thel848 Māhele, Kamehameha III. Lewis also

maintains that rampant noneomplianee has invalidated land claims ever since the Māhele. He finds, for example, frequent disregard for Kamehameha III's requirement that convicted traitors forfeit their land. "Samuel Damon, Sanford Dole, W.O. Smith, J. King,

W. R. Castle," he reeled off the names of the self-appointed "committee of public safety" that overthrew the monarchy in 1893. None of the individuals was ever convicted of treason or even tried, but according to Lewis, land title associated with them will be clouded until "a competent court of the Hawaiian Kingdom" somehow decides their cases. This might explain why See TITLE, page 2

U.S. District Judge David Ezra called Perfect Title's ehallenge to the state of Hawaivi's title "utterly and eompletely without merit."