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The family of a Bronx landlord, who was clinging to life when he was hit with two lawsuits over a loan he was forced to take out during the pandemic-related rent moratorium, is now considering suing the lender after he died over the weekend, the family’s lawyer said.
Jeffrey Schneider, 62, was on life support after contracting COVID-19 when Premier Capital Funding LLC filed the suits to claw back $58,000 on a $23,000 high-interest loan he took out in May through his company Remie Realty Corp. — after many of his struggling tenants stopped paying rent, according to court papers filed by Schneider’s wife last month.
Now, the family is considering suing the lender over its allegedly shady loan agreement with Remie and Schneider, who died Sunday after being on a ventilator and life support since Nov. 29.
“The last moments [the Schneider family members] were together they were thinking about how could they get out of this financial situation, how could they get out of this debt, how could they stop these vultures from circling,” the family’s lawyer Ashlee Colonna Cohen told The Post.
“They should have been able to spend those last moments talking about how much they loved each other and how much they meant to each other and being able to let go in peace.”
Schneider sought the lifeline when the pandemic state eviction moratorium forced his company into dire financial straits, according to the court papers filed by his wife, Cindy.
The landlord of the rent-controlled Bronx apartment building managed to pay back $25,000 of the roughly $35,000 total he owed on the high-interest loan before coronavirus landed the fully vaccinated man in the hospital on Nov. 7 — where he remained until he died, leaving him unable to run his business, the filing said.
Premier Capital then filed the two suits against Schneider and didn’t back down even when Cindy informed them he was on death’s door and offered to repay the $11,000 remaining balance on the loan, she alleged in the papers filed last month.
“We are reserving every single one of our rights that we have and plan on asserting those rights in court against this company. We are not going to take this lying down,” Colonna Cohen said.
“Remie Realty ceased to exist with Jeffrey’s passing and under the agreement, they shouldn’t be permitted to enforce this any longer,” she continued.
“We already know the legality of the collections process is questionable. I would go so far as to say that that they were unlawful.”
“There are huge, glaringly obvious problems between what the lender has advertised the product to be and how they represented the product to Jeffrey and what it actually was,” Colonna Cohen said of the loan agreement.
Premier Capital and a lawyer for the company did not immediately return requests for comment.
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