Mbna

CHARLIE Cawley was schooled by Benedictine monks imbued with humility, but he did not absorb the trait. Why would he? His achievements might have turned St. Benedict himself into a blowhard, and Cawley was no St. Benedict. From scratch, Cawley built a financial company that earned $2.3 billion last year and is worth $34 billion on the stock market. He invented the idea of decorating credit cards with logos of universities and associations, thus getting the organizations to do much of the hard work of peddling the plastic.

Maryland is having another one of those family feuds about business taxes and regulation that outsiders find hard to follow. "MBNA! Business climate!" "Delaware! Loopholes!" "Marriott!" "Blackmail!" "Fair share!" "Confiscation!" A small state with a liberal legislature, big corporations and neighbors with lower taxes and less regulation is going to have this conversation every five years or so, and it's healthy. Unfortunately, the discussion has a tendency to bulldoze nuances and polarize interest groups no matter what measure is under consideration.

MBNA Corp.'s ratings were lowered yesterday by Standard & Poor's Ratings Group, which said the company didn't set aside enough money to cover potential losses in its fast-growing credit card business.S&P lowered the long-term counterparty and senior unsecured ratings to BBB from BBB-plus, and preferred stock to BB-plus from BBB-minus.Wilmington, Del.-based MBNA, the country's second largest issuer of credit cards, began in Maryland but moved its corporate offices to Delaware in 1982. It will re-establish a presence here next spring when it opens its mid-Atlantic headquarters, with about 3,000 workers, in Hunt Valley.

When Bank of America Corp. announced its $35 billion acquisition of MBNA Corp. in summer 2005, many people questioned whether it would work. MBNA, a stand-alone credit-card giant that started in Baltimore as part of MNC Financial Inc., took pride in its fast-paced and entrepreneurial spirit, its freewheeling spending and a secretive corporate culture. Executives roamed its opulent headquarters in Wilmington, Del., where the phrase, "Think of yourself as a customer," was spelled out in small gold capital letters on both sides of at least 1,700 doorways.

MBNA American Bank will become the official credit card issuer of Major League Baseball, the company said yesterday.MBNA signed Major League Baseball to an exclusive agreement that allows it to use all 30 team logos on its credit cards and in nationwide marketing campaigns.The company will have rights to issue credit cards bearing the marks and logos for other Major League Baseball-related programs, such as the Cooperstown Collection of memorabilia, the Negro Leagues and Major League Baseball events that include the playoffs, World Series and All-Star games.

Baltimore County's Ethics Commission has concluded that there is no ethics violation in Executive C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger's business relationship with a credit card company planning to move to the area.The commission's unanimous ruling noted that Ruppersberger has recused himself from involvement in the relocation of Delaware-based MBNA Corp., which plans to open a regional headquarters in the area. And it said there was no evidence that his business, a collection agency that handles some work for MBNA, would benefit from the county's dealings with MBNA.

BY MANY accounts, MBNA Corp. President Charles Cawley is a proud, prickly chap, unsuited to respond to the brickbats of running a big company with the bland tact favored by his Fortune 500 peers. Cawley called Jesse Jackson a "damned fool" after Jackson implied managers of the big credit-card concern were "rats" who ran a discriminatory enterprise. Queried once by a journalist about a critical press report, Cawley called it "a bull---- question" about "a bull---- article." Last year two stock analysts who rated the company a "hold" instead of a "buy" were banned from an MBNA conference.

WILMINGTON, Del. -- MBNA Corp., the third-biggest U.S. credit-card issuer, agreed yesterday to buy the $103 million credit-card portfolio of First Virginia Banks Inc. of Falls Church, its second acquisition since December.First Virginia, the state's biggest independent bank, said it expects an after-tax gain of $11 million, or 22 cents a share, from the transaction. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter.MBNA and other top credit-card companies are rapidly buying up the card businesses of regional banks who lack the size to operate efficiently in the competitive business.

BELFAST, Maine - Nearly a decade ago, with little advance notice, credit-card company MBNA Corp. dropped thousands of jobs into this one-stoplight city then poured millions of dollars into local schools and nonprofits - all because, according to local legend, a friendly resident lent money to the man who one day would be MBNA's chief executive when his car broke down. Almost overnight, as MBNA's work force exploded, Belfast was transformed. The city, once home to chicken factories that poured grease and guts into the Passagassawakeag River, began to teem with executives in business suits, talking on cell phones and riding around in black SUVs.

MBNA CORP. is a lode of Delaware jobs, the No. 2 private employer in that state, a vital force in the fastest-growing economy in the Northeast.It is the second biggest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the world, behind Citicorp. Its Delaware offices hand out fortnightly paychecks to 8,600 workers. Its profits have doubled in five years; its stock quadrupled.MBNA is growing so fast that last week it was paying college graduates $100 each merely to attend a job fair in the hope that they might apply.

Maryland is looking at the same old ideas to overhaul its revenue system. Raise the sales tax. Change the income tax. Snore. It ought to pursue the bold, innovative course taken by West Virginia: Start taxing stuff in other places. Last month West Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals ruled that MBNA, the credit-card company, must pay West Virginia's corporate income tax for 1998 and 1999 even though MBNA had no operations there. All of MBNA's employees, buildings and other assets were in Delaware, Maryland and elsewhere.

BELFAST, Maine - Nearly a decade ago, with little advance notice, credit-card company MBNA Corp. dropped thousands of jobs into this one-stoplight city then poured millions of dollars into local schools and nonprofits - all because, according to local legend, a friendly resident lent money to the man who one day would be MBNA's chief executive when his car broke down. Almost overnight, as MBNA's work force exploded, Belfast was transformed. The city, once home to chicken factories that poured grease and guts into the Passagassawakeag River, began to teem with executives in business suits, talking on cell phones and riding around in black SUVs.

Now Delaware may get to feel consumers' pain Jay Hancock's column "Plan to buy MBNA may deliver a big blow to tiny Delaware" (July 6) accurately points out the problems that arise when a state changes its rules to lure a big corporation and the accompanying jobs. In Delaware's case, the changes in state law offered up on a silver platter to MBNA (the lifting of the limits on interest rates and fees charged to credit card customers) resulted in a nonstop, no-limit assault on consumers.

CLOSE YOUR EYES, gulp it down and grimace, Delaware. It's a bitter brew. Delawareans are trying to see the bright side of Bank of America's plan to buy MBNA, the Wilmington-based credit-card colossus, for $35 billion. True, MBNA will shrink, Delawareans tell themselves. But the state still has DuPont, a nascent biotech industry and the country's top business-courts mill. Corporate mergers happen every day. Things will eventually be OK for Delaware. Won't they? Yes, but "eventually" can be a long time.

WILMINGTON, Del. - MBNA Corp.'s imprint touches so much of this riverside city, some locals joke that the credit-card giant "owns" it. So, when the world's largest independent credit-card lender announced Thursday that it was being bought by Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America Corp. for $35 billion in cash and stock, just about everyone in town was talking about what would become of the company, Wilmington and the "First State," as tourism signs proudly proclaim. "Delaware is a small place.

Bank of America Corp. will acquire MBNA Corp. -- the credit card giant that traces its roots to the Baltimore area, where it still has operations -- in a $35 billion cash and stock deal that will result in 6,000 job cuts nationwide. The sale will shake up the credit card industry, likely leaving consumers with fewer choices and higher fees, experts said. And it will reverberate throughout Maryland's business and political establishment, which has long had ties to MBNA's current and former executives.

MBNA America Bank yesterday introduced a premium credit card with a limit that can give consumers who qualify enough cash to put a hefty down payment on a house.The nation's second-largest bank card issuer behind Citibank is offering the no-fee MBNA Platinum Plus Visa or MasterCard, which has a credit limit of up to $100,000.The new card should be in consumers' hands within four to six weeks, said Peter Osborne, a spokesman for the Wilmington, Del.-based company."We are constantly surveying our customers and this is something they told us they wanted," he said.

Credit card giant MBNA Corp. intends to establish its mid-Atlantic regional headquarters in Hunt Valley in April, a facility that the company says will eventually employ 3,000 -- significantly more than originally projected.At that size, MBNA would become Baltimore County's second-largest private employer and generate more than $700 million a year in wages, benefits and taxes to the region."The Hunt Valley area fit our needs, and was attractive from many perspectives," said Peter H. Frank, an MBNA spokesman.

NEW YORK - When Bruce L. Hammonds, the chief executive of the MBNA Corp., stepped into the company's Sikorsky S76C at the heliport at 34th Street in Manhattan with five senior executives on Friday afternoon two weeks ago, the mood was jovial. The executives had spent the day secretly negotiating to sell their company, one of the nation's largest credit-card issuers, to Wachovia, the big bank. Both sides had agreed to the basic outlines of the deal; the only thing left to settle was the final price.

DOVER, Del. - To many among the 140,000 at Dover International Speedway yesterday - and even to a few drivers in Nextel Cup cars racing against him - the appearance of Greg Biffle as the driver to beat was unexpected. "Where did Greg Biffle come from?" were the first words spoken by second-place finisher Kyle Busch yesterday after Biffle and his No. 16 Ford had scored a 4.281-second victory over Busch in his No. 5 Chevrolet in the MBNA RacePoints 400. "At the end, there was no catching Greg Biffle," Busch said.