Edgar Kaiser Replaced as President of Bank

Dale G. Parker has been named president and chief operating officer of the Bank of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He succeeds Edgar F. Kaiser Jr., who remains chairman of the bank, Canada’s eighth largest.

The shift comes at a time when the bank is undergoing a restructuring that will reduce its size by about 10%; it said it will sell or close 19 of its 60 branches within the next 45 days.

George E. Hare, vice chairman of the bank, will resign effective June 30.

Kaiser, the grandson of industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and former chairman of Fontana-based Kaiser Steel, hired Parker and Hare within two weeks of one another early last summer.

Kaiser joined the bank in September, 1984, and began an aggressive campaign to shore up its capital position and shed weak operations. Most of the branches being closed were purchased only last year in an aggressive expansion move into the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Kaiser, who for a time owned the Denver Broncos football team, admitted that he had little banking experience. In a previous interview he said: “I indicated at the time I joined the bank that one of my first moves was going to be to find a banker and . . . we took our time to find the right people”--Parker and Hare.

In a telephone interview Wednesday, Kaiser reiterated that position, saying that he had accomplished the restructuring that the board had hired him to do.

Of Parker’s succession, he said: “We would have done it sooner, but we could see there was trouble” looming in the oil- and farm-based economies of the Prairie provinces. “We saw that as we planned the down-sizing of the bank that it was the right time to make Dale chief executive.”

Kaiser said that between the bank’s actions and new programs instituted by the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation, of which he is chairman, “it has not been a dull week.”

Parker, 49, joined the bank as president of its Canadian banking operations. He previously had been executive vice president of the Bank of Montreal.