Will the Last CertusBank Employee Please Turn Off the Lights?

Lola Hart has left the building.

Hart, who oversaw the liquidation of the controversial CertusBank in South Carolina, has been hired as the chief accounting officer of Entegra Financial in Franklin, N.C. Hart, once the top accounting executive at Certus, was its last remaining employee, according to the resume on her LinkedIn page.

Hart's departure is one of the final chapters of an outlandish tale of a community bank's collapse.

Certus, formed in 2011 to buy failed banks, ran up pretax losses of about $170 million between 2012 and 2014. It fired its three founders — Milton Jones, Walter Davis and Angela Webb — weeks after an American Banker article detailed the bank's poor financial performance, lavish spending and conflicts with investors. A fourth founder, Charles Williams, also stepped down.

John Poelker, a turnaround expert, was brought in and methodically sold off pieces of the company to other banks. Most of those sales closed last year.

Hart was not implicated any wrongdoing, nor was Tom Strom, a Certus alumnus who was also recently hired by Entegra. Both hires were announced in an Entegra press release Monday.

Hart's hiring "will be valuable to Entegra as we continue to look for opportunities to grow through both traditional channels as well as acquisition opportunities," David Bright, Entegra's chief financial officer, said in the release.

Strom will be Entegra's director of mortgage banking. Strom ran Certus' mortgage division from September 2011 to December 2013 and had recently served as mortgage director at Greer State Bank in Greenville, S.C, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A call to Roger Plemens, Entegra's chief executive, was not immediately returned.

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