I'm not sure if that act applies to commercial dealings. Might be consumer only.
IANAL, but Google tells me: Regulation B, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), applies to every aspect of a credit transaction. There is no Regulation B exception for commercial loans, even though there are exceptions for commercial loans in other regulations, including Regulation Z, the Truth in Lending Act.
My business partners happened to both be gay men, but they weren't in relationships with each other. We were getting the loan in a personal capacity, so it was technically a consumer loan covered by three friends. Their corporate horsefuckery from Chase was probably not legal, however I'm OK with it since I found a way to retaliate. My business partners gave me a Weasel of the Year Award for the most creative use of a corporate veil.
I do hope you will elaborate. :)
+1. You can't tease us like that!
Well, we took out the loan in a personal capacity, and Chase larded it up with a bunch of conditions I didn't like, including that particularly odious one about having to sign a paper indicating that none of us was fucking any of the others. It seemed to me that requiring that sort of document as a condition of getting the loan should have been illegal, however because of the timing of the balloon Chase had us over a barrel. We couldn't rapidly lock in a mortgage with anyone else.
Besides Chase's we're-not-fucking paper, there were some restrictions as to how we could use the property, such as whether we could use the basement unit to create a 5-plex out of a 4-plex given that the loan was for a 4-plex or smaller. So I signed restrictive clause after restrictive clause, prompting my partners to do the same. I made sure it there was no reference to our LLC in any of the bank documents. Then, I then pointed out that having a LLC is a bit like having an evil twin on whom you can blame everything. No sooner was the ink dry on the loan document than I turned around and transferred the title of the property to our LLC. You can only do this if you really, really trust your business partners.
For spite and profit, I then proceeded to deliberately do every single thing in a corporate capacity that I promised Chase I wouldn't do in a personal capacity, except of course for balling my business partners which wouldn't have made sense. We made every single loan payment on time so their attention wasn't drawn to our loan in particular. They didn't lose money by doing business with us, and nobody actually got hurt.
I ran my shell game move by our lawyer after the fact, and he sort of hit the roof but did acknowledge that what I'd done was (barely) legal, just unethical. I had no problem with that, being Not A Nice Person. There's a reason my partners voted me to be the enforcer with the responsibility of collecting rent, doing repairs, screening and evicting, and getting rid of undesirables such as a pack of drug cartel squatters.
Counter-sodomizing Chase and deliberately lying to them isn't something I'm particularly proud of, however the way we did it was technically within the letter of the law which is more than I can say for Chase's treatment of us. I wouldn't have done it if they hadn't been such douches to us first. My preference is to do business in a very open, honest way. However I did grow up in oil and gas so I've got the ability to play dirty if necessary.