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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Someone should give Mark Ritchie a heads up to fix a corporate record, and to expedite it as a professional courtesy to his predecessor.

Here's an image [click it to enlarge and read it] of the out-of-date record the Minneosta Secretary of State's office has online for the bank holding company for the failed Otsego operation, Community National Bank. The address of the SoS record is that of what is now the Central Bank's owned site, where that Stillwater operation is still attending to takeover mop-up after arranging a deal where the FDIC ate the lion's share [twenty million dollars] of mop-up.



That failed holding company is ousted from the banking locale; to settle its affairs, as FDIC has published online, at a different site.



I would hope that SoS Ritchie would expedite cutting over the record to list the firm as headquartered at Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer's campaign War Room site.




I would hope and expect SoS Ritchie would even do the cutover of the record to show "Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer" as an "Agent Name" that seems much more folksy and informative than "No Agent Named."

AND that he'd do it without demanding his predecessor present a photo ID.

But fees due would have to be paid --- SoS Ritchie is not the kind that would let $190,000 slip between the cracks for the state auditor's finding and commentary; nor would he be lax with lesser amounts. He'd be on the up-and-up on all the numbers, the cash in, the cash out (on payroll or elsewhere - expenses, travel, whatever).

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Readers are invited to give SoS Ritchie's staff a call; to give notice aimed to assure this particular record is not allowed to languish without updating. Be a good citizen. Make the call.


_______UPDATE_______
Some teabagger idiot submitted a comment into moderation that is so shallow and off point that it suggests he/she should spend time starting his/her own blog in order to choose his/her issues for comment and analysis. I am not publishing the comment, a power that goes with control of content here.

Yet the teabagger did raise one legitimate question, why should I feel this thing is important? What are my reasons, beyond a "let's discredit Mary Kiffmeyer" thing? It is a fair question, even when posed stupidly, as per the rejected comment.

To me, there are serious issues and public dimensions of concern involved in failures in community banking, given the importance of credit and money in capitalist economy, and another issue to me is the suggestion of bias in operating a bank - the "were I to have refused to have prayed in the lobby or under the wall art, would my loan have gone through" concern.

Along with that key worry over duties and responsibilities of fairness in credit assessment decisions that attach to the privilege of being granted a banking charter, there are two bothering beliefs I would like proof on - first, that management was wholly incompetent and prone to use not only biased lending criteria but to employ grossly unsound practices and policies, (with the incompetence reaching to include whatever supervisory board role Mary Kiffmeyer had over the short lifetime of the thing), and the second concern, whether politics was a factor for the bank being allowed to last as long as it did using other peoples money and having the public FDIC safety net under the depositors where all the remainder of sound banking had to end up eating twenty million dollars of mismanagement and might have eaten far less had the thing been neutralized and unwound sooner - the question of whether the regulators were too deferential to politics, especially at the state level where governor appoints the head regulator to oversee the banking of the Secretary of State's pet project, all being GOP and within that party knowing its demographic appeal to fundamentalists mentalities as a bloc vote.

That second concern reduces to the as yet unanswered public question - was the inept "fighter" allowed to last until the tenth round when it should have been knocked out, on the ropes, in the third - as sometimes happens when mob money is on a particular round of a fight. A third round "knockout" presumably would have cost the rest of the banking system (via the FDIC) less in the ultimate cutover to new ownership, and that means all of us, the public, consumers, would have suffered less of a pass through of that cost of extended life of Riverview Community Bank which we now ultimately (as lowest rung in the trickle down ladder of banking costs) have to pay and endure.

Aside from that, here's another reader help issue: Who is Craig E. Scherber and what was the maneuvering where he sought to acquire control of that bank's holding company (the one now sharing the Kiffmeyer family business and politicking address)? Presumably this Scherber fellow would no longer be interested, as the status now presumably is a holding company without any held bank.

So what role in the demise, particularly in apparently unnaturally extended life support measures before the demise of a banking situation, if that was the case, would hinge on Craig E. Schermer, who he is, what he wanted, and who he knows?

Any reader with any knowledge is urged to email info. Mary Kiffmeyer, if you read things online about you per a Google Alert or such, and read this, please send an email. It would short circuit a lot of further effort for each of us. Things could be answered fully and in public now, and not drag into next year and its election cycle.