Hanmi Financial seeks investors

Hanmi Financial Corp., which has been hammered by losses on commercial real estate and ordered by regulators to raise capital, disclosed that its chairman traveled to South Korea to speak with potential investors.

The terse statement by the Los Angeles company came in the wake of rumors that the firm, the parent of Koreatown’s Hanmi Bank, would be acquired by a South Korean banking company.

With $3.4 billion in assets, Hanmi disclosed in November that regulators had ordered it to raise $100 million in fresh capital by July or face seizure by the government.

On Friday, Hanmi issued a statement saying its chairman, Joseph K. Rho, had traveled to South Korea to speak with potential investors including Woori Finance Holdings, a large Seoul-based financial services company that is mostly owned by the government. The statement provided few details.

The company issued the statement after its stock sank 37 cents, or 15%, on Friday to $2.18. That decline, however, followed a more than doubling of the share price in the two preceding weeks.

On Monday the stock edged down 3 cents to $2.15.

Woori Finance has $237 billion in assets and is the parent of New York-based Woori America Bank, a community bank with $1 billion in assets of its own, according to Chris Stulpin, an analyst at D.A. Davidson & Co.

“So there is plenty of money backing Woori America,” Stulpin said in an e-mail. But would the U.S. government bless the deal? “I still believe it would be very difficult for regulators to accept a bank owned by a large South Korea company [that is 73% held by the state].”

But there’s recent precedent for a foreign bank buying a troubled U.S. bank. In August, regulators shut down Guaranty Bank of Austin, Texas, which had 59 branches in California.

It was immediately taken over by BBVA Compass, a Birmingham, Ala., bank that is owned by the parent company of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria of Spain.

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