Deadline, Deal Expire for First Alliance, Standard Pacific

First Alliance Corp.’s bid to acquire a savings and loan for up to $11 million died Monday after federal regulators failed to give their approval to the planned purchase of Standard Pacific Savings.

First Alliance, an Irvine mortgage banking company, and the nearly dormant Newport Beach thrift had set Jan. 31 as the deadline for completing the transaction. That date had been extended from a Dec. 31 deadline.

But the Office of Thrift Supervision never acted on the request to approve the acquisition, which was first announced in June. The agency didn’t give a reason for its lack of action. It has in the past taken more than a year to consider certain applications, typically killing the deals.

“We’re very disappointed,” said Mark Mason, First Alliance’s chief financial officer. “But we can’t waste time after a certain point.”

First Alliance will abandon its efforts to obtain a thrift or a banking charter for now, Mason said, though it may revive its quest “sometime in the foreseeable future.”

The company had wanted to use the less costly deposits of a regulated institution to fund its loans and wanted to market directly its new credit cards, which draw on home equity lines of credit. It now can issue only affinity cards, which are handled through a bank.

Standard Pacific’s parent company, home builder Standard Pacific Corp. in Newport Beach, still wants to dispose of the thrift, said Arthur E. Svendsen, the parent firm’s chairman. The company, he said, will continue to use the investment banking firm of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. to help sell the S&L.;

The thrift once held loans and other assets totaling more than $420 million when it was the main financing arm for its parent company. But the home builder put the thrift’s operations on hold in early 1995 while it considered scuttling the S&L;’s mortgage banking focus in a period of rising interest rates.

Eventually, the parent company decided to sell the thrift, which now has less than $120 million in assets.