US probes firm's luxury golf outings - WSJ

CHICAGO, June 13 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators are exploring whether luxury golf outings hosted by Fiderion Group, an Atlanta-based executive-search firm, may have violated federal banking laws, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Fiderion Chief Executive James B. Norton III told the newspaper Fiderion entertained executives of Regions Financial Corp (RF.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on annual golf vacations from 2002 to 2008, adding that Fiderion had done nothing wrong.

U.S. law bans bank employees from accepting anything of value intended to influence business decisions. Exempted are items like "reasonable" business lunches and gifts "based on obvious family or personal relationships."

Representatives of Fiderion and Regions were not immediately available for comment on Saturday.

Birmingham, Alabama-based Regions is the country's 14th-largest bank, with $142 billion in assets. The company received $3.5 billion in federal bailout funds last year, the Journal said.

The newspaper cited three former Fiderion employees who said the firm spent a total of more than $100,000 on Regions officials at the outings.

Norton would not say how much Fiderion had spent on Regions officials, which Regions executives participated in the trip and how much search work the company performed for the bank.

He said he believed the golf outings complied with the bank's rules on vendor relationships.

In March, an official in the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's supervision and regulation division said in a letter to a former Fiderion employee that the Fed was "fully exploring" whether the trips violated federal banking law.

Representatives of the Atlanta Fed could not immediately be reached for comment on Saturday. (Reporting by Matthew Lewis; editing by Paul Simao)