SOUTHEAST

Even before Robert H. Warrington became First Indiana Corp.'s president in June, the struggling Indianapolis company was showing signs of a recovery.

Its headquarters are still in Alabama, but Colonial BancGroup Inc.'s latest deal makes it very much a Florida company.

At my class reunion at Brown a few years ago I was asked to participate in an ethics panel. I started out with a joke, of course.

WesBanco Inc.'s February 2001 announcement that it was acquiring the $660 million-asset American Bancorp was supposed to signal the start of a major out-of-state expansion for the Wheeling, W.Va., company.

BankFinancial Corp., of Olympia Fields, Ill., plans to raise as much as $196 million in a full conversion to public ownership.

AF Financial Group of West Jefferson, N.C., has settled a dispute with the chief executive officer it fired in July.

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Park National Corp. in Newark, Ohio, has agreed to buy First Clermont Bank, a Milford thrift, for $52.5 million in cash, or two times its book value.

Congress is expected to miss an Oct. 1 deadline to keep lender fees associated with the Small Business Administration's flagship 7(a) loan guarantee program from jumping by 40% to 100%.

Banks are anteing up to defeat a ballot initiative that would deny government services to undocumented immigrants, concerned that it would make all immigrants, even legal ones, frightened to seek banking services.

UniBank in Miami has put itself on the block and will likely announce a deal the next two months, according to a local newspaper report.

Fidelity Bankshares Inc. of West Palm Beach, Fla., announced Wednesday that it would acquire First Community Bancorp Inc. of Pahokee, Fla., for $27.1 million of cash and stock.

MIDWEST

Summit Bank Corp. of Atlanta has gone global.

Central Bancorp Inc.'s move to rid itself of an insurgent investor by buying its stake for an above-market price in a privately negotiated deal has angered other institutional investors and prompted at least one, Sandler O'Neill Asset Management LLC, to dump its shares of the Massachusetts company.

Another community banking acquisition appears to be in danger of unraveling unless the seller is willing to lower its asking price significantly.

Three years ago it seemed inconceivable that a company as high-flying as Nara Bancorp Inc. could lose 20% of its market value on news that its accountant had resigned.

Whether or not it was once true that most bank presidents inherited the job, it isn’t now.