A few months after turning a profit ahead of its own schedule, 1st Mariner Bank announced Wednesday that federal regulators had lifted a 2009 order requiring the bank to raise capital.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued the cease-and-desist order in September 2009 after finding that the bank had "unsafe or unsound" banking practices. The bank faced soured mortgages that eroded its capital after the housing bubble collapsed.
Facing dwindling options, its parent filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2014 and sold the bank in June for $18.7 million after a court-supervised auction to a group of local and out-of-state players led by New York-based Priam Capital, an investment firm run by a Baltimore native.
The bank, recapitalized with $92 million in cash by the new owners, wrote off many of its nonperforming loans, cutting its ratio of bad assets to total assets from 7.5 percent to 2 percent. With its assets down about $126 million to $830 million as of March 31, the bank's leaders say they are looking to grow organically and through acquisitions. The bank made a small profit of about $500,000 in the first quarter of this year, something it didn't expect to happen until later this year.
Rob Kunisch, the bank's president and chief operating officer, said this week the bank had been told by regulators in March that it met the conditions of the 2009 order.
The FDIC confirmed on Thursday that the order had been lifted as of June 18.