TowneBank, which received the taxpayer-funded repayment of a People Express Airlines loan, lends more money to its directors and executives than virtually any other bank in the United States.
Some of those bank officials played key roles in the financial deal that eventually led the Peninsula Airport Commission to pay off People Express' $4.5 million debt to the bank, state auditors have said — but TowneBank makes a lot of loans to people who run it, its financial filings with federal regulators show.
TowneBank's $370 million in loans to directors, executives and associates as of March 31 was the third largest of the 5,910 banks filing financial statements with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, a Daily Press review found. The two banks that do more are four and three times TowneBank's size.
