Baltimore Bank

Wachovia Corp. publicly apologized yesterday for two predecessor institutions that owned slaves or allowed them to be used as collateral, and it revealed that two of Baltimore's oldest banks profited indirectly from slavery. The nation's fourth-largest bank disclosed its ties to the slave trade in a 111-page report to comply with a Chicago ordinance requiring companies that do business with the city to determine whether they had profited from slavery, which was abolished by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Eugene J. Sheehy, who was sent to Baltimore three years ago by Allied Irish Banks PLC to help its Allfirst Financial Inc. subsidiary recover from a huge currency trading scandal, is being called home to Dublin to lead the parent bank. Next month, Sheehy, 50, will take over Ireland's largest company from Chief Executive Officer Michael D. Buckley, who is retiring. Sheehy is chairman and chief executive officer of the Mid-Atlantic division of M&T Bank Corp. of Buffalo, N.Y., which bought a majority stake in Allfirst from Allied Irish for $3.1 billion in September 2002, six months after Sheehy arrived.

Three years after one of the largest bank frauds in history foreshadowed the end of Allfirst Financial Inc., the "rogue" trader at the center of that scandal is the only person from the former Baltimore bank who has faced a day in court. That might change in the coming months. This week, two lawsuits from shareholders who contend that higher-ups at the bank should have known about and policed the $690 million trading scandal will be merged into a 70-page complaint in federal court in New York.

Will the Old Goucher Historic District become Baltimore's next hot neighborhood? The answer could depend on what happens to one of the district's most prominent buildings when it goes up for auction next week. The former headquarters of the Federal Land Bank of Baltimore, built starting in 1926 at 2315 St. Paul St., will be offered for sale at 2 p.m. Dec. 14. Now largely vacant, the six-story structure is one of the largest office buildings in the historic district where Goucher College operated before moving to Baltimore County in the 1940s.

Allied Irish Banks PLC has fired a well-aimed shot that could result in the recovery of millions of dollars from two of the country's largest banking companies, which allegedly aided a rogue trader in defrauding the Dublin bank of $691.2 million, industry experts said. Allied, the former parent company of Baltimore-based Allfirst Financial Inc., sued Citibank and Bank of America last week, seeking to recover about $500 million in compensatory damages - the share of the losses it attributed to the banks' alleged wrongdoing.

In its biggest acquisition to date, Baltimore-based Mercantile Bankshares Corp. has agreed to acquire F&M Bancorp of Frederick in a cash-and-stock buyout worth an estimated $500 million, the two banks announced yesterday. With the acquisition, Mercantile will leapfrog into the No. 2 position in terms of Maryland deposits. The buyout also will give Mercantile a foothold in many affluent markets where it lacks a strong presence. It's already Maryland's largest independent bank. "I think this is a great deal for Mercantile, for its customers and for its shareholders," said Edward J. "Ned" Kelly III, the bank's chairman, chief executive officer and president.

In one of the city's recent cases of vigilantism, a 60- year-old man who shot and wounded three youths pleaded guilty in Baltimore Circuit Court yesterday to a crime prosecutors say was motivated by the man's growing rage with problems on his block. William Banks will spend up to 10 years in prison for shooting the youths with a .38-caliber revolver he had stolen from his employer the night before the confrontation July 28. Banks, who told detectives that he had had several run-ins with the youths and had phoned police dozens of times to report neighborhood problems, emptied his five-shot revolver about 1 p.m., hitting the victims several times.

Elizabeth K. Wilson, a retired bank officer, died Saturday of a cerebral hemorrhage at Bonnie Blink, the Maryland Masonic Home in Hunt Valley. The former Tuscany-Canterbury resident was 102. Born Mary Elizabeth Kirwan and raised in East Baltimore, she was a 1918 graduate of Eastern High School. Family members said she recalled seeing her first horseless carriage on East Baltimore Street. Her father raised her on his shoulders to observe the 1904 Baltimore fire. About 1920, she became a clerk at Eutaw Savings Bank.

M&T Bank Corp., which agreed this week to buy scandal-tarred Allfirst Financial Inc., will face many challenges in stitching together the two companies, but the biggest could be reviving employee morale at the Baltimore bank, industry experts said yesterday. Over the past seven months, Allfirst employees have watched as the bank was embarrassed in one of the industry's biggest scandals. They have also seen a number of senior executives leave and have lived with rumors that Allfirst was for sale.

In the Region Prime Retail gets $700,000 in sale to pay down debt Prime Retail Inc. said yesterday that it had sold a 205,000-square-foot shopping center in Knoxville, Tenn., for $9.5 million and that it plans to use net proceeds to make a critical payment next month on a high-interest loan. The Baltimore real estate investment trust sold the Shops at Western Plaza, one of Prime's two strip centers, to WP General Partnership. The deal brought Prime $700,000 after it repaid a $2.5 million mortgage on the property.