Whitney Bank bounced back from a more than $90 million profit loss last year with positive earnings posted the first quarter of this year — just in time for its union with Mississippi-based Hancock Bank. The Times-Picayune’s Rebecca Mowbray reports that Whitney took in $17.3 million during the first three months of 2011, based on figures from what could be the last earnings release before Hancock’s buyout of Louisiana’s largest bank is complete. Pending the required regulatory and shareholder approval, the Hancock-Whitney deal will be finalized this quarter.
The gains from Whitney follow an expansion into Florida that brought on a heap of bad loans amid the economic downturn, costing the company $6.3 million in the first quarter of 2010 and another loss of $88 million in the last quarter of 2010.
The Hancock-Whitney marriage will bring combined assets of $20 billion.
Read more on the Whitney’s positive earnings and its merger with Hancock here. For more on the Whitney-Hancock merger, check out the February Abiz cover story, “Raw Deal.”
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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