Today is the day banks with outstanding TARP loans are due to pay quarterly dividends to Treasury.
Though Treasury has received almost $9 billion in principal and interest on Troubled Asset Relief Program loans, a lot of attention has been devoted to the TARP borrowers that have fallen behind on their payments.
A report from SNL Financial points out that one small bank, Saigon National Bank of Westminster, Calif., is on the verge of missing its sixth dividend payment — which would trigger a clause that would give Treasury the right to appoint two directors to the board.
Saigon, of course, isn’t exactly Citigroup when it comes to the scale of the taxpayer investment. The bank has $65 million in assets and a TARP loan of $1.5 million.
Saigon is also far from the only bank in arrears. The Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversees TARP for the government reported in March that 79 banks missed their February payment. As of March 31, 11 banks had missed four quarterly payments, the report said.
The SNL report notes that in some cases, banks say they could pay dividends but are being told not to by regulators. Saigon National claims it is part of this group.
“We have not received approval from the OCC to pay the dividend,” Saigon’s financial chief, Roy Painter, told SNL, referring to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
With good reason, you might say. The bank lost $6.9 million last year, wiping out more than half its capital. Saigon has since raised capital but it lost money again in the first quarter and has yet to bring its capital up to the size of last year’s loss, according to financial filings. Its shares last traded months ago on the over-the-counter bulletin board for the rich price of 18 cents each.
What’s more, Saigon has seven times more real estate loans than it has capital, which is what regulators view as a risky concentration of assets in a declining market. Regulators worry about banks that have three times as much real estate as they have capital.
Nonetheless, the story does raise an interesting point: when it comes to deciding whether a bank like Saigon can afford to pay a dividend on its TARP preferred stock, the guys telling the bank not to write a check to Treasury are sometimes from the OCC, which is itself a branch of Treasury. Such is the post-bailout world of banking.