Monday Business Roundup

Facing Life in Prison, Boulder Banker Chooses Death

By Richard Martin, 11-05-07

When it came down to face-the-music time, former Boulder banker Edward Mattar III took the traditional desperate-financier’s way out: a long walk off a short ledge. Newspapers around the country reviewed Mattar’s life and times after he plunged 27 stories to his death in downtown Denver just hours before he was to be sentenced for his role in the failure of BestBank. And it was not a pretty story.

At 67, Mattar faced spending the rest of his life in prison after being convicted in February of conspiracy, bank fraud, filing false bank reports and wire fraud. His personal fortune was decimated: he faced fines of $14 million.

“Depositors lost more than $200 million when regulators shut BestBank in July 1998,” reported the Denver Business Journal.

This was hardly the first time Mattar stiffed investors and customers. Named president of Central New England College in Worcester, Mass. in 1978, he pulled down one of the highest salaries of any college president in New England. Ten years later he was forced out; the century-old college went bankrupt and shut down with $14 million in debts.

“In 1984,” according to the Worcester Telegram, “he owned the Feel Fit Health Center of Leominster, which shuttered abruptly and left a number of area residents who had paid for memberships without recourse.”

Somehow Mattar was able to buy a bank in Colorado just a year after being dumped by CNEC. In a way the BestBank saga was a preview of the subprime mortage crash: he made money by selling credit cards to less-than-qualified customers, an even dodgier financial ploy.

Denver Post columnist Al Lewis, who has covered the BestBank implosion from its inception, was perhaps the least charitable commentator on Mattar’s ignominious end: “Mattar had been a deadbeat for much of his life,” wrote Lewis, and he was “a deadbeat until the very end.”

In other business news:

-- Ready for a horde of disheveled music fans dancing in front of multiple stages in Denver’s City Park? That’s the idea of the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which wants to put on “a yearly music and arts festival in City Park on the scale of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.” Now before the Denver City Council, the proposal would create the “Mile High Music and Arts Festival,” with 50,000 or so revelers listening to 60 bands on five stages next July.

-- After a series of rocky financial reports, Denver minerals giant Newmont Mining Corp. said last week it had doubled its quarterly profit from the year before. Bolstered by foreign tax credits and a settlement on a joint venture in Uzbekistan, Newmont reported net income of $397 million for the three months ended Sept. 30.

-- Continuing to respond to the prospect of massive global climate change, Xcel Energy said last week it is considering voluntarily closing some of its power plants in Colorado to cut emissions of carbon dioxide. Colorado’s largest utility, Xcel “has steadily increased use of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar plants, in recent years,” reports Cathy Proctor of the Denver Business Journal, “but now the Minneapolis-based company may become the nation’s first utility to close power plants to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”

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