HF Holdings Is Among Suitors Talking With FCA
Financial Corp. of America said Tuesday that it has been holding discussions with half a dozen companies--including HF Holdings--that are interested in acquiring long-ailing Irvine-based FCA and its American Savings & Loan Assn. subsidiary.
HF Holdings, headed by former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon and former Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Preston Martin, acknowledged that it is gathering information and holding “very preliminary” talks with FCA officials about a possible purchase.
“We’re looking at FCA and putting together statistics,” Martin said in a telephone interview Monday.
Gerald L. Parsky, a Los Angeles lawyer and spokesman for Simon, said, “We have had discussions with the bank board, the bank board’s advisers and FCA officials.”
Complicated Negotiations
William J. Popejoy, FCA’s chairman, has never previously identified possible suitors and has insisted that a sale of the company is not necessary. And he continued to maintain in an interview Tuesday that any claim that a sale is needed to salvage the company is “overdramatized, overstated.”
Still, Popejoy acknowledged that Edwin J. Gray Jr., chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, which supervises savings and loan firms, “has wanted FCA to be strengthened for some time, and he wants that to happen on his watch,” which ends next month when Gray’s term expires.
The sheer size of FCA--whose S&L; subsidiary has nearly $34 billion in assets but needs $1.1 billion in new capital to meet regulatory requirements--ensures long and complicated negotiations, Popejoy, Martin and Parsky agreed. American S&L; is the nation’s largest savings institution.
HF Holdings has already bought most or all of financially ailing World Trade Bancorp, a Beverly Hills bank holding company with $75 million in assets, and two distressed S&Ls--Honolulu; Federal S&L;, Hawaii’s largest with $1.7 billion in assets, and Southern California S&L;, a $1.1-billion institution in Beverly Hills.
Also, it is negotiating to buy two more troubled savings institutions--the $1.4-billion Bell S&L; in San Mateo and the $1.7-billion Pacific Savings Bank in Costa Mesa.
“We’re farther along with Bell than (with) the others,” Martin said.
He and Parsky said Pacific Savings would be bought if regulators come up with some financial assistance, as they have done in previous acquisitions.
Simon is known for buying troubled companies in ailing industries at depressed prices and then making millions of dollars by turning them around and selling out.
He turned to the S&L; business last summer to build what he called a “mosaic of financial institutions” to capitalize on the West’s burgeoning growth of financial services and Far East trade.
