Investor Group Pays $9.4 Million for Corporate Bank

An investor group led by veteran Orange County bankers Stanley Pawlowski and Gary M. Wrigley has completed its $9.4-million purchase of Corporate Bank, Wrigley said Monday.

The 40 investors, composed mainly of the small Santa Ana bank’s customers, bought the 10-year-old bank from sole shareholder James A. Carter.

Carter, an Anaheim developer, has been eager to get out of financial services industries that are regulated. He lost his investment in Beach Savings Bank earlier this year when federal thrift regulators seized the Fountain Valley institution, declaring it “unsafe and unsound.”

Each of the investors purchased stakes worth 2.5% of Corporate Bank, Wrigley said.

The bank’s management has been reorganized, with Pawlowski as chairman, Wrigley as chief executive and Richard Brown as president. Previously, Wrigley was president and chief executive and Brown was executive vice president.

Corporate had $102.8 million in assets at the end of March and earned $439,000 for the first quarter. Second-quarter results have not been released.

Pawlowski is a former chairman of El Camino Bank in Anaheim, which was sold Jan. 1 to Wells Fargo Bank in a deal that also included Citizens Bank of Costa Mesa. Citizens Holdings, a holding company that owned the two community banks, wanted to get out of the banking industry.

Pawlowski and Paige V. Simpson, a former Citizens Bank chairman who is now vice chairman at Bank of Newport in Newport Beach, have been wooing their former business customers at Wells Fargo. Simpson has been working out of a new Bank of Newport branch barely 100 yards from the Wells Fargo branch that was his former headquarters.

Corporate Bank will seek approval soon from regulators to open a branch two blocks away from Pawlowski’s former El Camino headquarters.

Ironically, Wrigley said, Corporate Bank has an option to lease its new office from Wells Fargo, which occupied the building before moving into the El Camino headquarters building.