By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon MVB File
SOUTH BRONX NY, May 13 – Alongside the wrongdoing by big banks from JPMorgan Chase to KeyCorp, there are other also dubious proposed merger by smaller banks and predators.
Fair Finance Watch is on the lookout, with Inner City Press on the FOIA, and filed this sample on MVB Bank:
Dear Chair Powell, Secretary Misback and others in the FRS: This is a request for a full copy of, and a timely first comment on, the Applications of MVB Financial Corp., Fairmont, West Virginia; to acquire Integrated Financial Holdings, Inc., Raleigh, North Carolina, and thereby indirectly acquire West Town Bank & Trust, North Riverside, Illinois, and acquire voting shares of West Town Payments, LLC, Raleigh, North Carolina, "and more."
Fair Finance Watch has been reviewing West Town Bank including its 2021 HMDA data not taken into account in any CRA exam and finds it troubling. FFW in looking into MVB Bank find its offers of banking for gaming, but for CRA questions, not even an email address, only a snail mail address. This is not a best practice, far from it.
In terms of HMDA data, in 2021, West Town Bank made 319 mortgage loans to whites with seven denials. Meanwhile to African Americans it made only TWENTY FIVE loans, while denying five applications. A referral should be made to the DOJ for fair lending violations. MVB, proposing to buy West Town Bank including its hemp lending, is engaged in gaming lending, fintechs - but has not put its CRA file online or even available by emailing."
Since filing, MVB provided Fair Finance Watch with what it calls its 271-page CRA file (for some reason, only "as of April 2022") which we put on DocumentCloud here to make it public as all CRA files should be, and the Fed has now informed Inner City Press that MVB withdrew its application.
MVB was quoted, lying, that it was because of "an activist investor" challenging the CRA rating: "Larry Mazza, CEO of the $3.6 billion-asset MVB Financial, said in an interview Wednesday that "a activist investor in IFHI had challenged the company's Community Reinvestment Act rating. With regulators exceptionally busy managing the regional bank failures, MVB and IFHI determined it could prove difficult to resolve that matter efficiently." The publication never fact-checked Mezza. We'll have more on this.
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