AILEY, Ga. (AP) — A South Georgia bank closed by federal
regulators has a missing board member who’s accused of millions in
fraud.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said it seized
Montgomery Bank & Trust in Ailey on Friday. The bank, 170 miles
southeast of Atlanta, had struggled for several years with bad loans
made during the expansion boom on Georgia’s coast.
The FDIC said
Montgomery Bank was acquired by Moultrie-based Ameris Bank, and its two
branches in Ailey and Vidalia would reopen Monday. Ameris is assuming
all of the bank’s $164 million in deposits and the FDIC is retaining the
bulk of the failed bank’s $173 million in assets.
Depositors of
Montgomery Bank will automatically become depositors of Ameris Bank.
"Customers can be confident that their deposits are safe and readily
accessible," Ameris President and CEO Edwin Hortman said.
Montgomery Bank is the sixth bank in Georgia to fail this year.
On
Tuesday, the U.S. attorney’s office in New York announced that missing
director Aubrey Lee Price has been charged with wire fraud involving the
embezzlement of $17 million from the bank.
After telling upper
management that he was investing in U.S. Treasury securities, he wired
bank funds to accounts he controlled and prepared falsified statements
to cover his tracks, the federal complaint said.
The banker has
been missing at least since June 16. He vanished after writing friends
to tell them he had lost large amounts of client funds on trades and
wanted to kill himself, authorities said.
Investigators say Price,
46, was last seen boarding a ferry in Key West, Fla., bound for Fort
Myers, Fla. He had "previously stated that he owns real estate in
Venezuela" and "may own a boat that would be large enough to travel to
Venezuela from Florida," the complaint says.
Besides the complaint
by the U.S. attorney’s office, the federal Securities and Exchange
Commission has filed a complaint accusing him of defrauding more than
100 investment clients in Georgia and Florida, the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution reported Saturday.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.
