Hanmi Financial Corp.'s on-again, off-again relationship with South Korean banking giant Woori Finance Holdings Co. is back on again.
Less than two weeks after Woori's deal to acquire a majority stake in Hanmi was called off, Hanmi said Monday that it Woori's investment unit, Woori Investment and Securities, intends to acquire a 4.9% stake in the Los Angeles company.
Hanmi said in a Monday press release that it plans to raise a total of $75 million from the private placement and a public offering it announced last week.
The Woori investment would end more than a year of negotiations between the two companies. In May 2010, Woori announced that it would invest $210 million in Hanmi, but the deal never received regulatory approval and was terminated earlier this month.
The $3 billion-asset Hanmi caters largely to Korean-American consumers and business owners. The company, which suffered heavy losses when the Southern California real estate market crashed, said it intends to contribute a "substantial portion" of the proceeds to its Hanmi Bank subsidiary for use as additional capital and "to support future organic and acquisition-driven growth."
