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Did Rep. Waters give bank unfair help?
Friday, March 13, 2009
(UPI) - Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., arranged a meeting at which the head of a bank with ties to her husband asked for $50 million in federal aid, regulators said.
Treasury officials told the newspaper they did not know at the time of the meeting that Waters' husband, Sidney Williams, had been a director of OneUnited, one of the largest black-owned banks in the country. He resigned from the board early last year.
Waters sits on the House Financial Services Committee.
"Here you had a tiny community bank that comes in and they are not proposing a broader policy -- they were asking for help for themselves," said Steve Lineberry, a former Treasury aide who was at the meeting. "I don't remember that ever happening before."
OneUnited got $12 million in December through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. cited the bank in October for "unsafe and unsound banking practices," including giving the chairman, Kevin Cohee, perks like a Porsche sport utility vehicle and maintenance of his California beach property.
OneUnited, headquartered in Boston, has branches in Miami and Los Angeles. Waters helped the bank acquire Family Savings, a small black-owned institution in her district, in 2002.
Cohee told the newspaper he resented any suggestion that Waters did anything improper.
"Ms. Waters is an important advocate for minorities and minority issues and an indispensable part of Los Angeles communities," Cohee said. "But we derived no benefit whatsoever from any activity related to her. And she did not really do anything. There is nothing that she did that impacted the process."
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