BANKING

Bank Owners Fight On: Delta Savings Bank would be a forgettable failure in the industry were it not for allegations that federal regulators were racially biased against the Korean-born owners and for a court’s recent finding that a federal examiner blackmailed executives into hiring her.

Still, the Office of Thrift Supervision seemed to score a victory on Sept. 25 when a federal judge threw out the owners’ lawsuit challenging November’s government takeover of the tiny Westminster thrift.

But five days after making his ruling, U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon decided that the former owners could take a different tack to continue suing the government over the takeover as well as to add allegations of racial discrimination.

Lawyers for the owners, meantime, also are asking the judge to reconsider his previous ruling. Among the documents they provided Kenyon are the factual findings of an administrative law judge, who absolved two directors of blame for Delta’s failure.

That judge determined that an OTS agent had blackmailed Delta’s directors into hiring her. He also found that the OTS had failed to prove that the two Delta directors had knowingly done anything wrong and that they had caused the thrift to lose money.