Former Spokane banking executive Patrick J. Rusnak, who was credited here with helping to bring AmericanWest Bank back from the brink of collapse, has been named to take over as chief financial officer at Los Angeles-based PacWest Bancorp this fall.

Rusnak will succeed Victor R. Santoro, who plans to retire in mid-August. PacWest said in a press release that following Santoro’s retirement, he will continue to work with the company as vice chairman-corporate development and to assist with the transition of his CFO responsibilities to Rusnak.

PacWest is a bank holding company with one wholly-owned banking subsidiary, Pacific Western Bank, and more than $16 billion in assets. Through 80 full-service branches located through California, Pacific Western provides commercial banking services, including real estate, construction, and commercial loans, to small and medium-sized businesses.

PacWest, which is traded on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol PACW, last week reported first-quarter net income of $73.1 million, up from $71 million in the year-earlier quarter. 

Rusnak will join the company on April 27 as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Pacific Western Bank, the news release said.

“We are delighted to welcome Pat to the PacWest organization,” said Matt Wagner, PacWest’s president and CEO in the press release. “As a proven and successful financial manager, he brings a wealth of experience that will be invaluable to us as we continue to build our first-in-class franchise serving businesses in our market areas across the United States.”

“He will make an excellent addition to our executive management team, and I look forward to working with Pat in the years to come,” Wagner said.

 Rusnak most recently served as CFO for Spokane-based Sterling Financial Corp., which was acquired last year by Portland-based Umpqua Holdings Corp. He previously served in several executive roles for AmericanWest Bancorp., the holding company for AmericanWest Bank.

Banner Corp., the publicly-traded, Walla Walla-based holding company for Banner Bank and Islanders Bank, agreed late last year to acquire AmericanWest Bank in a $702 million transaction. That transaction isn’t expected to be completed until later this year.

Under the terms of the agreement, the banks said, AmericanWest equity holders would receive 13.23 million shares of Banner common stock and $130 million in cash. The combined banks are expected to have more than $9.7 billion in assets, $6.8 billion in loans, and $7.9 billion in deposits. Together, they had 190 branches in five states—Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and California—at the time of the announcement.

Rusnak was an executive at AmericanWest Bank here from 2006 to 2010. He was appointed CEO at AmericanWest in 2008 and steered the bank through bankruptcy and its ultimate sale to private investors.

Scott A. Kisting, chairman and CEO of that investor group, a wholly owned subsidiary SKBHC Holdings LLC, a California company set up specifically to buy troubled community banks, also became AmericanWest’s new chairman, president, and CEO.

Kisting lauded Rusnak and his management team in a January 2011 interview, shortly after the acquisition. He said they took decisive steps to correct real estate and development loan problems that had caused the then-37-year-old bank to come under a regulatory mandate to increase its capital or possibly be shut down.

AmericanWest, which had struggled for the previous couple of years under heavy loan losses and a mandate by federal regulators to boost its capital, received a $185 million capital injection from SKBHC as part of the acquisition, restoring it to “well-capitalized” status. The transaction also involved SKBHC buying all outstanding shares of the bank from the form holding company, AmericanWest Bancorp., for $6.5 million.

At the time of that transaction, AmericanWest, which had its headquarters at 41 W. Riverside, was operating 40 financial centers in Eastern Washington, North Idaho and 18 in Utah, the latter group under the name Far West Bank.