First Vietnamese American Bank (FVAB) has been shut down by state regulators, five years after opening in Orange County’s Little Saigon neighborhood as the only U.S. community lender with a core clientele of Vietnamese immigrants, according to the L.A. Times.
The same bank that took over Alfredo Amezcua’s failed Santa Ana Business Bank, Grandpoint Bank of Los Angeles, will take over First Vietnamese’s $48 million in assets and $47 million in deposits. The failure is expected to cost the national deposit insurance fund $9.6 million, the FDIC said in announcing the takeover late Friday.
FVAB already took down their website, but I was able to retrieve it. Click here to see who was on their Board of Directors. I half expected to see a few of Van Tran’s amigos on the list, but I never heard of any of their directors.
A local blog did wonder if the FDIC delayed the takeover of this bank because of Van Tran’s campaign against Loretta Sanchez. They could have taken over awhile ago, but oddly they waited until after it became clear that Tran had lost.
In related news, Bolsavik posted an interesting article about how the O.C. Vietnamese candidates got trashed on Election Day. I think that all of the negative mailers against Tran, by Sanchez, ended up hurting Tran’s allies as well.
Why is Obama’s administration taking over so many banks?