UMB Bank, N.A. v. Tupulua

Summary

The Hawaiʻi Supreme Court held that UMB Bank failed to establish standing to foreclose because genuine issues of material fact remained as to whether its predecessor, Wells Fargo, possessed the promissory note on January 20, 2015, the date the foreclosure complaint was filed: the location-tracking spreadsheet was riddled with undefined and ambiguous transaction codes, and the possession certification predated filing by more than a year. The court further held that the parties' pretrial stipulation did not independently establish possession on the filing date and that enforcing it would be inequitable because it was filed after the circuit court's erroneous summary judgment standing ruling, which bound the parties as law of the case. FOF 7 was therefore clearly erroneous and FOF 24 incorrect; the court vacated the ICA's judgment and remanded for the parties to resolve the factual dispute. No separate opinions were filed.