Waters’ Favorite Bank Faces Trouble

“Five years ago this month, Mayor Thomas M. Menino stood with community leaders in Roxbury to hail plans for a new OneUnited branch in the neighborhood. The bank’s president pledged to make loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars across Boston, with a special emphasis on low-income borrowers.

“OneUnited said it would partner with the city to offer the mortgages to first-time and current homeowners, and provide financial literacy training to residents. ‘As a child of an inner-city community I can tell you, it doesn’t get any better than this,’ the bank’s president, Teri Williams, told the crowd that day.

“But no loan program ever emerged — one in a long list of failures by the nation’s largest minority-owned bank, which is controlled by Williams and her husband, Kevin Cohee, the bank’s chairman.

“In recent years, regulators have admonished the bank for poor performance and lavish executive pay, and Cohee himself has had personal run-ins with the law in California. And the bank, despite its diminished role as a community lender, sought and received help from US Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, to secure $12 million in federal funds after the bank lost money on risky investments. Waters now faces House ethics charges in the matter because her husband had a stake in the bank.

“Nearly two years after receiving a bailout, OneUnited Bank remains financially troubled and its plans unclear. Its assets have plunged 18 percent in that time, to $518 million. Total loans on the books have dropped by 13 percent, to $322 million, and few new loans have been made this year.”

Read more: (Beth Healy, “Troubles Remain, Future Uncertain for OneUnited,” Boston Globe, 09/10/10)