A.P.v. the Citizens

California's 73-year-old Amadeo Peter Giannini is probably the world's most ardent exponent of branch banking. His huge Bank of America, fourth largest bank in the U.S., is an agglomerate of 30 years of Giannini acquisitions. Its 487 branches blanket the state of California. Its parent company, Transamerica Corp. (whose stock is so popular with California Italians that it sometimes accounts for almost half the trading on the San Francisco Stock Exchange), owns a majority interest in 23 other West Coast banks, plus a juicy 8.7% of Manhattan's National City Bank.

More recently A.P.'s Transamerica has shown an interest in other things: it owns three insurance companies and, until last week (see p. 77), it controlled the West Coast's major independent finance company. Last year Transamerica added three small war babies (a foundry, two aircraft-parts manufacturers) and a tobacco company (Axton-Fisher, Fleetwood cigarets) to its portfolio. But last week embattled old A. P. was back on his old stamping grounds, engaged in a knockdown, drag-out fight to gain control of another bank.

This time it was the $200,000,000 30-branch Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank, third largest in Los Angeles.

A. P. has been after Citizens off & on for some 20 years. Last month he made a new offer: that Transamerica exchange its 124,000 shares of National City Bank for a like amount of Citizens stock. Citizens men wanted no part of A. P. or his offer: solemnly its directors met and voted it down. A. P., nothing daunted, went over their heads, made his offer directly to Citizens stockholders in bold, six-column newspaper ads. Citizens cracked back with its own message to stockholders. Meanwhile someone got Washington hot & bothered: reports from "Congressional circles" spoke of new anti-bank-holding-company laws; rumors ran up & down Spring Street (Los Angeles Wall Street) that A. P. had agreed with Henry Morgenthau not to take too much Citizens stock. At week's end, no one knew how many of Citizens' 1,685 stockholders would rise to A. P.'s bait--or whether his offer would be renewed when it expired this week.

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