You have to love this:

If you go back about 20 years, you come across a bank regulator known as Darrel W. Dochow who overrode the recommendation of bank examiners in the matter of Lincoln Savings and Loan, of Keating 5 fame, that the institution be seized because it was insolvent.

Of course, a little while after that, it collapsed, at far greater cost to the taxpayers than had they acted earlier.

So, where is Mr. Dochow now? He’s the western regional director for the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), and he figures prominently in the failure of IndyMax.

It seems that he signed off on a back-dated transfer of money to the now failed thrift:

The Office of Thrift Supervision’s western regional director, Darrel W. Dochow, allowed IndyMac Bank to receive $18 million from its parent company on May 9 but to book the money as having arrived on March 31, according to the Treasury Department’s inspector general, Eric M. Thorson. The backdated capital infusion allowed IndyMac to plug a hole that its auditors had belatedly found in the bank’s financial results for the first quarter. If IndyMac had not been able to plug that hole retroactively, its reserves would have slipped below the minimum level that regulators require for classifying banks as well capitalized.

Though the $18 million transaction was minuscule in comparison to IndyMac’s $32 billion in assets, it had tremendous significance. If IndyMac had lost its well-capitalized status it would not have been allowed to accept “brokered deposits” from other financial institutions. Brokered deposits are typically high-yielding certificates of deposit arranged by brokers and sold to savings and loans. IndyMac relied heavily on brokered deposits, which amounted to $6.8 billion or 37 percent of its total deposits last spring.

“This is very significant in terms of whether IndyMac was over or under the O.T.S.’s thresholds for capital,” said Bert Ely, a veteran banking analysts in Alexandria, Va. “But what’s really troubling is that it seems to have been going on elsewhere.”

What is even more troubling is that this guy still had a job in bank regulations, and what’s more, he had a senior position.

Why this man was allowed to do anything that did not involve asking, “Do you want fries with that?” Is the real question here.

I don’t know if Darrel Dochow ever took a dime, or a dinner, or even something as inconsequential as a calendar or a pen, from anyone related to the industries that he regulated, but it’s clear that even if he broke no laws, he is corrupt, and he should be kept away from balance sheets and regulation for the rest of his natural life.