BankUnited seized and sold

Federal regulators ended months of suspense and seized BankUnited FSB, a struggling Florida thrift with $12.8 billion in assets.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. then sold the banking operations to a private equity consortium that includes billionaire turnaround investor Wilbur Ross, retired banking executive John Kanas, The Blackstone Group and The Carlyle Group.

The buyers agreed to take most of the failed bank's assets and liabilities, and to inject $900 million in capital into the successor company, BankUnited of Coral Gables, Fla.

The old BankUnited had been struggling under the weight of bad home loans. Regulators had given the institution until the end of last year to raise $400 million in additional capital. That could have cleared the way for the Treasury Department to provide another large infusion of cash through the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Kanas, the former chief executive of New York's North Fork Bancorp, will run the new BankUnited. Kanas sold North Fork to Capital One Financial Corp. in 2006, and left the combined company less than a year after that $14.6 billion deal.

BankUnited is the 34^th financial institution to be shut down by regulators this year, compared to 25 for all of 2008. The FDIC estimated that the failure would cost its insurance fund around $4.9 billion -- the second biggest hit since the economic crisis began.

The investors who created the new BankUnited agreed to take $8.3 billion of its deposits and $12.7 billion of its assets. The investors and the FDIC entered into a loss-sharing arrangement on $10.7 billion of those assets, which means the cost to the FDIC could increase.