Stephen Calk

Stephen Calk (b. 1964/1965) is the founder, Chairman and CEO of The Federal Savings Bank, a Federally Chartered National Bank headquartered in Chicago. He was an economic advisor to Donald Trump during the 2016 United States presidential election campaign.[2][3] Calk currently serves as an Ambassador for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.[4]

Stephen Calk
Born1964/1965 (age 55–56)[1]
Pontiac, Michigan, U.S.
EducationUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (BA)
Northwestern University (MBA)
Known forEntrepreneur
Political partyRepublican
Spouse(s)none
Children3

Early career

Calk was born in Detroit, Michigan, and was raised in Florida, Illinois, and London. He attended the United States Military Academy Preparatory School, and is a 1988 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[5] In 1998, Calk received a Master of Business Administration degree from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Calk is also a graduate of  the nine-year Presidents Program in Leadership at Harvard Business School.[6] In 1982, he enlisted in the United States Army and was honorably discharged as a Private First Class before he was early commissioned as an Army Officer. He is a graduate of the United States Army Aviation School and served in both active and reserve status as a combat helicopter pilot and commander for over 16 years.[7]

He had served his community on many civic and philanthropic boards including serving as the Chairman of the United States 10th Congressional District's Service Academy Selection Committee and as a Certified Leader in the Boy Scouts of America. He has served as a Trustee for the University of Illinois St. John's Catholic Newman Center and on the Board of the USO of Illinois. Since 2002, he has been a member of the Chicago Chapter of the World Presidents Organization and Young Presidents Organization. He is a proponent and advocate of Veteran housing needs. Calk is a trainer and mentor of junior military officers and senior NCO's prior to taking command positions or returning to civilian life after service to their country. He has also served on numerous civic and philanthropic boards and is a member of The Economic Club of Chicago, The Harvard Club of New York City, Halter Wildlife Preserve, and The Chicago Club where he served on the Membership Commission. Calk is a nationally recognized expert in the fields of finance, economics, and real estate finance as well as National Security and Military issues. In 2016/2017 Calk served as a Senior Economic Advisor to the President-Elect of the United States. In 2017 Calk was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, Midwest division. He has served on the Board of Directors, Advisory Board of Directors, or Customer Advisory Board of Directors for various public and private companies including JP Morgan Chase’s Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp., Ohio Savings Bank, Citimortgage, Bank of America, and the former General Electric Mortgage Insurance Company. He is regularly featured in print and on-air national news programs including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Fox Business News, CNBC Squawk Box, CBS evening news, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, Money, Crains Chicago Business, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. Calk has served as an advisor to the Governor of the State of Illinois, the Commissioner of Banks. and Real Estate and the Office of Professional Regulation for the State of Illinois on matters of Mortgage Banking and Real Estate finance.[4][8][9]

Calk's banking career began in 1995 when he founded Chicago Bancorp, which has been described as "one of the largest privately-held retail mortgage banks in the country” and served as its President until it was later absorbed into The Federal Savings Bank, where, with his brother John, he focused on issuing mortgages on single-family homes to veterans.[10][11] Calk moved his bank's headquarters to Chicago in 2014 after the city offered him tax breaks.[10] Calk struck an agreement with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel that promised to bring up to 400 new employees to a gentrifying neighborhood west of downtown. The city agreed to pay the bank $10,000 per employee, in what was the largest-ever grant of its kind, to cover job training costs. In the end, Calk and his brother John pulled off a neat trick: Their bank, among the most profitable in the country that year, collected $3.6 million in public subsidies in substantial part by rehiring employees who they had recently fired from a separate company that they also owned. “It was blatantly obvious what they were doing, and how they got away with it is beyond me,” said a former Federal Savings Bank employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The city and the bank said in written responses to questions that Federal Savings fulfilled all of its obligations, and that the funds were only paid after the job training was completed and verified.[10]

In 2016, he was an economic advisor to Donald Trump during the 2016 United States presidential election campaign. Calk calls himself a centrist who backed President Barack Obama in 2008. He says he’s only met Trump three or four times, at social or charitable events. “He seemed to take a real interest in the fact that I was a single dad, that I was a family man, that I built my business, and I think he had a lot of respect for that,” Calk says. Calk has respect for Trump’s economic plans, especially cutting child-care costs and cutting business taxes to 15 percent. In 2020, The Federal Savings Bank, which specializes in home loans for veterans and first-time home buyers, has 1722 employees with an annual asset turnover of nearly $12 Billion.[12]

Loans to Paul Manafort

Manafort first got in touch with Federal Savings Bank of Chicago in April 2016, according to testimony given by the bank's senior vice president Dennis Raico at Manafort's August 2018 trial for fraud and tax evasion. Dennis Raico, Rick Gates and Paul Manafort discussed loans and politics over dinner in New York in May 2016. On July 28, Calk became directly involved in discussions about loans to Manafort and his son-in-law for investment properties, which Raico told the court was unusual. In fact, he owed $3 million. "I must have had a blackout," Manafort wrote in his email. On October 16, Manafort asked to change the terms of the loan, requesting a line of credit on the property instead of using it as collateral for a construction loan for a California property. In his application materials for the loan, Manafort provided a 2016 income statement for himself that his business partner Rick Gates later testified was false.

James Brennan, another vice president at the Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, testified at Manafort's trial that Manafort failed to declare in his application materials that two of his New York properties were already mortgaged and that Manafort's statements about his income in 2015 were inconsistent.[13] Brennan also testified that bank employees had noticed that Manafort seemed to have no income as of July 2016, though he claimed to be owed $2.4 million, and that he was more than 90 days late on a $300,000 credit card bill.[14] Concerns within the bank about the propriety of the loan were overruled by Raico, however, and on November 16, 2016, Manafort received from Federal Savings Bank of Chicago a $9.5 million cash-out refinance loan on a house in Bridgehampton, New York.[13] On January 4, 2017, Manafort received an additional loan from Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, a $6.5 million construction loan on a property on Union Street in New York City.[15] The bank has since written the loans off as a loss.[14]

Investigation and Trial of Paul Manafort

In 2016, Federal Savings Bank of Chicago approved large loans from his bank to Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's former campaign manager.[16][10]

In 2018 bail hearing and in a superseding indictment filed against Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, the office of U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleged that Manafort had fraudulently applied for around $16 million in loans from "Lender D," reported by multiple sources at the time as the Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, before and shortly after the 2016 presidential election. In court filings, Mueller alleged that Manafort had doctored financial statements from his lobbying firm, "overstating its income by millions of dollars," and had committed a "series of bank loans and bank loan conspiracies."[2]

On May 23, 2019, Calk was indicted by the Southern District of New York for financial institution bribery for allegedly approving $16 million in loans to Manafort. His lawyers, Daniel L. Stein and Jeremy Margolis said outside the courthouse that Calk was not guilty and would be exonerated at trial. Stein, reading from a statement, said the charge against Calk was “a travesty,” and the bank's loans to Manafort were “good loans.” “Those loans simply were not a bribe for anything,” Stein said.[17] The trial for Stephen Calk, former CEO and the Chairman of the Chicago-based Federal Savings Bank, was set to begin in Manhattan federal court on 2 December 2020 but U.S. District Court Judge Lorna Schofield agreed to the government's request to put the trial off until 8 February 2021 because of COVID-19 pandemic-related concerns.[18][19]

Calk had been named to the Trump campaign's economic advisory panel in August 2016.[20][21] After Trump's election, Dennis Raico, a senior vice president of Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, ask Manafort whether Calk might be named Secretary of the Treasury or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, according to testimony at Manafort's trial by Raico, although Raico also testified that, he never did ask.[15][22] President Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort admitted Friday that he defrauded a Federal Savings Bank of Chicago of $16 million in loans.[23]

Indictment

In May 2019, Calk was charged in the Southern District of New York with a single count of financial bribery related to the investigation mentioned above and ties to Paul Manafort. He is currently on bail awaiting trial.

References
  1. Chicago Bank CEO Stephen Calk, Who Issued Loans to Paul Manafort, Pleads Not Guilty to Bribery
  2. Protess, Ben; Silver-Greenberg, Jessica (2017-10-30). "Investigations of Manafort in New York Are Beyond Trump's Power to Pardon". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  3. Drabold, Will (August 5, 2016). "Meet Donald Trump's Economic Advisors". Time.
  4. "STEVE CALK". Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Retrieved 2020-12-10.
  5. "Executive Profile: Stephen M. Calk". Bloomberg.com. New York, NY. 2018. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  6. "Executive Profile: Stephen M. Calk".
  7. "Kapos: Meet the Chicago exec banking on Trump, flaws and all".
  8. "Alumni Notes: Stephen M. Calk '83" (PDF). Shield & Diamond. Memphis, TN: Pi kappa Alpha Fraternity. October 1, 2016. p. 71.
  9. "Kapos: Meet the Chicago exec banking on Trump, flaws and all". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  10. Monte, Reel; Wack, Kevin (July 25, 2017). "Behind Manafort's Loans, a Chopper Pilot Who Flew Into Trump's Orbit". Bloomberg. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
  11. Brown, Lisa (July 21, 2014). "CitiMortgage seeks $4.5 million in the lawsuit against Chicago bankers". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. St. Louis, MO. Retrieved August 13, 2018.
  12. "Chicagoan Is Economic Policy Adviser To Donald Trump". 2016-08-08. Retrieved 2021-01-23.
  13. Weiner, Rachel; Bui, Lynh; Kranish, Michael; Barrett, Devlin (August 13, 2018). "Prosecution rests after two weeks of testimony in Manafort case". Washington Post. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
  14. Sneed, Tierney; MacNeal, Caitlin (August 13, 2018). "Witness: Bank Prez Opposed Manafort Loan Approved By Bank CEO Trump Adviser". Talking Points Memo. Retrieved August 15, 2018.
  15. Weiner, Rachel; Zapotosky, Matt; Bui, Lynh; Jackman, Tom (August 10, 2018). "Paul Manafort trial Day 9: Manafort got $16 million in loans from bank whose CEO wanted Trump administration post". Washington Post. Retrieved August 10, 2018.
  16. McIntire, Mike (2017-04-12). "After Campaign Exit, Manafort Borrowed From Businesses With Trump Ties". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  17. Larry Buchanan and Karen Yourish (May 20, 2019). "Tracking 29 Investigations Related to Trump". nytimes.com. Retrieved May 22, 2019.CS1 maint: uses authors parameter (link)
  18. Gerstein, Josh. "Pandemic threatens bribery trial for Manafort associate". POLITICO. Retrieved 2020-12-22.
  19. Orden, Erica; Rothfeld, Michael (2018-02-22). "Mueller Examines Manafort Loans". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2018-02-27.
  20. Tankersley, Jim; DelReal, Jose (August 5, 2016). "Trump's economic team has six men named Steve but no women". Washington Post. Retrieved August 15, 2018.
  21. Zapotosky, Matt; Bui, Lynh; Weiner, Rachel; Jackman, Tom (August 14, 2018). "Paul Manafort trial Day 11: Emails show Manafort deeply involved in his financial dealings". Washington Post. Retrieved August 14, 2018.
  22. "Paul Manafort Trial Live Updates: Gates Admits Having Affair as Defense Attacks Him". New York Times. New York. August 7, 2018. Retrieved August 7, 2018.
  23. Goudie, Chuck; Markoff, Barb; Tressel, Christine; Weidner, Ross (2018-09-14). "Former Trump campaign boss Paul Manafort admits Chicago bank fraud". ABC7 Chicago. Retrieved 2020-12-10.
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