Beach First posts massive loss

Beach First National Bancshares, days after demoting Walt Standish from his position as chief executive, announced Tuesday it lost a staggering $30 million in 2009.

That’s a substantially increase over 2008, when the Myrtle Beach-based parent of Beach First National Bank lost $3.7 million.

For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Beach First posted a deficit of $6.1 million, compared to $4 million a year earlier.

“… the decline in real estate values in our Grand Strand and Hilton Head Island markets has continued to affect our customers, and in turn, the bank’s performance,” Standish said in a statement. “After careful analysis of the loan portfolio, we continue to increase our reserve for potential loan losses.”

Over the past year, Beach First has seen its assets decline more than 8 percent, to $613 million, according to information filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Stock in Beach First is trading for around $1.20 a share.

Standish was replaced as CEO on an interim basis by John S. Poelker, the company announced last week.

Standish retained the title of president of both Beach First National Bancshares and Beach First National Bank.

Also last week, the company announced that Standish’s employment agreement would not automatically renew following the end of its current term on March 1, 2010.

The notice, according to the SEC filing, was not a notice of termination and stated that Standish would continue to serve at the will of the board of directors without a written employment agreement.

Standish out as Beach First CEO

With earnings and stock price in the tank, change is afoot at Beach First National Bancshares.

On Friday, Beach First announced Walt Standish was being replaced as chief executive officer of subsidiary Beach First National Bank on an interim basis by John S. Poelker. In conjunction with this appointment, the bank entered into a consulting agreement with The Poelker Consultancy Inc., an executive management consulting company, effective Feb. 8, 2010.

Standish, however, agreed to retain the title of president of both Beach First National Bancshares and Beach First National Bank.

This came a day after the company announced that  Standish’s employment agreement would not automatically renew following the end of its current term on March 1, 2010.

The notice, according to the SEC filing, was not a notice of termination and stated that Standish would continue to serve at the will of the board of directors without a written employment agreement.

For the first nine months of 2009, Beach First lost more than $24 million. Its stock price has fallen from more than $14 a share two years ago to around $1 a share today.

TSFG loses another top executive

Like rats from a sinking ship, top executives continue to flee faltering South Financial Group.

The Greenville, SC-based financial services company announced Wednesday that Human Resources Director Mary A. Jeffery was retiring.

Jeffrey’s is the latest in a string of resignations for the embattled company:

• Last month, Christopher T. Holmes, South Financial’s director of corporate financial services, resigned to relocate to the Nashville area.
• In December, financier Darla Moore left the company’s board of directors.
• And in September, Carolina First Bank President Scott Frierson resigned “for personal reasons.”

Jeffrey was among South Financial’s better-paid executives, earning a salary of $225,750 in 2008 and total compensation of $573,894, according to information filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to the company, “Ms. Jeffrey and TSFG expect to enter into a consulting agreement for transition purposes over the next six months having monthly compensation of approximately $3,750 per month.”

In addition, the announcement says that TSFG and Ms. Jeffrey may agree to additional consulting engagements. ”If such additional engagements occur, these engagements will be billed at an hourly rate of $350 per hour; however, the magnitude of these additional engagements will not exceed 208 hours over the next six months.”

Given South Financial’s performance over the past two years, it’s hardly surprising the company is experiencing major turnover. 

TSFG has lost more than $1.3 billion since the beginning of 2008 and its stock now trades for less than 40 cents a share, closing Wednesday at 38 cents.

TSFG slips below 40 cents a share

Struggling Southeastern financial services company South Financial Group saw its stock hit an all-time low Tuesday, dipping below 40 cents a share.

The Greenville, SC-based parent of Carolina First Bank sank as low as 39.5 cents before closing at 41 cents a share, down 4 cents from Monday.

By comparison, the company’s stock was trading for around $15 a share in 2007.

The new low comes a week after South Financial reported a net loss of $193.9 million for the fourth quarter and $736.9 million for all of 2009.

Over the past two years, TSFG has lost more than $1.3 billion and seen its total assets decline from $13.6 billion to $11.9 billion.

SCBT expands into Georgia

The parent company of South Carolina Bank & Trust has expanded into Georgia, the result of a FDIC-engineered deal to take over Community Bank & Trust, of Cornelia, Ga.

Columbia-based SCBT Financial Corp. announced late Friday that subsidiary South Carolina Bank & Trust had entered into an agreement the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to assume the deposits and  certain assets of Community Bank & Trust.

Community Bank & Trust, founded in 1900, had 36 branches in Georgia. Based on the June 2009 FDIC summary of deposits, Community Bank & Trust ranked 7th in Georgia state deposit market share among Georgia-based institutions.

As of Sept. 30, 2009, Community Bank & Trust had approximately $1.2 billion in total assets and $1.1 billion in total deposits.

As part of the deal, the FDIC and SCBT entered into a loss-sharing agreement covering substantially all of the acquired loans and foreclosed real estate.

SCBT will not acquire any of the assets or assume any liabilities of Community Bank & Trust’s former bank holding company, Community Bankshares, Inc., nor its other bank subsidiaries, Community Bank & Trust of West Georgia and Community Bank & Trust of Alabama.

The addition of Community Bank & Trust’s 36 locations boost SCBT’s presence along the I-85 corridor from Charlotte to Atlanta, SCBT Financial CEO Robert Hill said in a press release. 

“This 110 year-old institution has a long history of serving the financial needs of the citizens of Georgia.  We look forward to helping them continue this legacy of service,” he added.

Reburial of Allied dead begins at Fromelles

The first of 250 unknown British and Australian soldiers whose bodies were buried by their Germans foes in mass graves in northern France during World War I was reburied on Saturday with full military honours.

The soldiers were killed in July 1916 during the Battle of Fromelles, generally considered a significant defeat for the Allies and described as “the worst 24 hours in Australia’s entire history.”

The Battle of Fromelles was fought at the same time as the better-known Battle of the Somme, which raged about 50 miles to the south.

At Fromelles, two divisions of Allied infantry had attacked a strongly fortified German position known as the Sugar Loaf.

The defenders knew the British and the Australians were coming; the terrain favored the Germans. As the British and the newly arrived Australians charged into battle, the Germans opened fire

An estimated 1,780 Australians and 503 British nationals were killed during the Germany victory and initially buried in mass graves. All told, 5,533 Australian soldiers and 1,500 British troops were killed, wounded or taken prisoner.

The unidentified bodies were discovered in mass grave sites in 2008 and experts have been working to find out who they are, but the identity of the first to be reburied remained unknown.

The remains were re-interred with British and Australian dignitaries in attendance at the military cemetery of Fromelles.

The British official said reburying the British and Australian soldiers who died in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles was part of an international effort to identify the fallen troops and give them a proper burial in individual coffins with their own headstones, The Times of London reported.

DNA testing is being done to identify as many of the soldiers’ remains as possible.

“It was the wish of both governments to give these brave soldiers a fitting place of rest, honoring the commitment shown to our fallen after the First World War,” British Veterans Minister Kevan Jones said, referring to Britain and Australia.

“Today we have started that process,” according to United Press International. “Work to try and identify them has already begun and I urge again any families who think they may have a relative killed at the Battle of Fromelles to come forward to assist with this.”

Saturday’s ceremony marked the first of the fallen soldiers to be buried with full military honors. The Times said Australian Veteran Affairs Minister Alan Griffin was on hand for the ceremony, along with surviving family members of those killed in the 1916 conflict.

The last reburial ceremony is to take place July 19, the 94th anniversary of the battle.

It is believed that one of the German soldiers involved in the battle was Adolf Hitler, then a 27-year-old corporal and a message runner in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, according to Wikipedia.

Nearly a century after World War I, the bodies of more than 165,000 Commonwealth soldiers are still missing, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

South Financial stock hits new low

The South Financial Group saw its stock hit an all-time low Wednesday, a day after posting its eighth straight quarterly loss.

Shares of the Greenville-based financial services company dipped as low as 44 cents before rebounding slightly later in the day. By day-end, TSFG was trading at 47 cents a share, still off 22 cents from Tuesday.

The company’s previous low had been 53 cents.

Late Tuesday South Financial reported a net loss of $736.9 million for 2009, compared with a net loss of $568.8 million the previous year.

For the fourth quarter, South Financial’s net loss was $193.9 million.

In the past year, South Financial has seen its total assets decline from $13.6 billion to $11.9 billion.

Remembering the Soviet sacrifice

To understand how differently World War II is etched into the collective history of the U.S. and Russia consider:

On the American side, one of the most venerated stories of the war is that of the Bedford Boys. On June 6, 1944, 19 Bedford, Va.-area soldiers were killed in the first wave of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, France. Many believe that Bedford lost more men, per capita on that day than any other U.S. locality during the conflict.

The memory of that sacrifice so seared itself into American consciousness that decades later the National D-Day Memorial would be located in Bedford.

Then consider this line from the introduction to former Soviet officer Grigory Baklanov’s classic World War II work Forever Nineteen:

“I was seventeen and finishing high school when the war broke out. We had twenty boys and twenty girls in our class. Almost all the boys went to the front, but I was the only one to return alive.”

The experience of Baklanov, who died last month at age 86, wasn’t uncommon. Some 24 million Soviets were killed during the conflict, or about 14 percent of the country’s total population. The U.S., by comparison, lost 418,000.

To put the Soviet effort in context, while the Allied invasion of Normandy gets big press in the West, approximately 85 percent of Nazi casualties were inflicted by Stalin’s forces.

We in the United States tend to consider World War II “The Good War,” because we largely escaped devastation of our homeland, had relatively light casualties compared to the other major combatants and enjoyed an almost immediate post-war economic boom.

However, the scars of that conflict still run deep through much of Europe and Asia, and will continue to do so for decades to come.

A Comedy of Errors, with your money

To say the S.C. Employment Security Commission has been operating in an unorthodox manner is being charitable, to say the least.

However, you can only put so much lipstick on this pig.

According to an audit released by the Legislative Audit Council Tuesday, and first reported on in detail by The Nerve, the ESC paid more than $171 million in state unemployment benefits during the last three fiscal years to “employees who were terminated for misconduct, illegal acts or other offenses.”

If that weren’t enough, in 2008, the ESC “stopped referring claimants for criminal prosecution who had fraudulently obtained unemployment benefits.” Claimants defrauded the agency out of more than $7 million in Fiscal Year 2008-09 alone, the report says.

Not surprisingly, the agency, which manages the state’s unemployment insurance fund, is struggling. The state’s unemployment insurance fund is more than $700 million in debt to the feds, and climbing. Nearly a decade ago, by comparison, the fund had a surplus of more than $700 million.

Entertaining in a Keystone Cops-sort of way are the examples of people who lost their jobs for some pretty good reasons but collected unemployment anyway, according to the report. They include:

• “An employee made unauthorized charges on his company’s credit card, which included motel rooms, hardware and Internet dating charges. He was terminated by the company, but ESC still allowed him to collect $3,586 in unemployment benefits.”
• “An employee was discharged for absenteeism due to his incarceration. The commission allowed him to collect $5,868 in unemployment benefits.”
• “An employee made a job-related threat and alluded to a weapon in his car. Police found a loaded firearm in the employee’s car. He was terminated for cause, but still collected $2,440 in unemployment benefits.” 

How reassuring: France defends Haiti

Kudos to Waldo Lydecker for highlighting the curiousity of French government officials accusing the U.S. of seeking to occupy Haiti in its efforts to bring relief to those stricken by the recent devastating earthquake.

Waldo includes a bit of Haitian history in which the French didn’t exactly endear themselves to Haitians:

In the 18th century, Haiti was France’s imperial jewel, the Pearl of the Caribbean, the largest sugar exporter in the world. Even by colonial standards, the treatment of slaves working the Haitian plantations was truly vile. They died so fast that, at times, France was importing 50,000 slaves a year to keep up the numbers and the profits.

Inspired by the principles of the French Revolution, in 1791 the slaves rebelled under the leadership of the self-educated slave Toussaint L’Ouverture. After a vicious war, Napoleon’s forces were defeated. Haiti declared independence in 1804.

As Haiti struggles with new misfortune, it is worth remembering that noble achievement — this is the only nation to gain independence by a slave-led rebellion, the first black republic, and the second oldest republic in the western hemisphere. Haiti was founded on a demand for liberty from people whose liberty had been stolen: the country itself is a tribute to human resilience and freedom.