FFCH registers $44 million loss for quarter

Charleston-based First Financial Holdings reported a major loss of $44 million for the three months ended June 30, thanks in large part to additional provisions for loan losses, the company said in a press release Thursday.

The holding company for First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Charleston reported its loss was up sharply from that of a year ago when it posted a $13 million deficit for three-month period.

Earlier this month, First Financial said it would record a loan-loss provision of approximately $73 million for the quarter. The charge is related to the reclassification of some $155 million in loans.

The reclassification is related to the company pursuing potential “loan-sale alternatives that are expected to result in the disposition of these assets by calendar year end,” First Financial reported in SEC filings.

Swiatek: a man who stood up to the Soviets

Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek, a revered figure to Belarusian Catholics due to his heroic resistance of communism, died last week at age 96.

Swiatek bore witness to the entire brutal 70-plus-year rule of communism in the former Soviet Union, being deported with his family to Siberia at age 3, being arrested and sentenced to death by the Soviet secret police in 1941, escaping two months later but being recaptured three years later and sentenced to a decade in the gulag.

After his release in 1954, Swiatek spent the next 30 years ministering in semi-secrecy to a Catholic community in the Belarusian community of Pinsk.

He not only outlasted the Soviet Union, but was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1994, the first from Belarus in some 200 years.