The U.S. Treasury will end up with a loss of about $60 million from its January 2009 bailout of Central Pacific Bank, Hawaii’s fourth-largest bank.

The Treasury, through its Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, provided Central Pacific with a $135 million financial lifeline in the midst of the recession but will be collecting only about $74 million from selling its Central Pacific stock. The Treasury plans to sell the last of its Central Pacific shares today.

The Central Pacific results are in contrast to the TARP program as a whole, where the Treasury earned $260 billion for taxpayers from the initial $245 billion it doled out to financial institutions.

Central Pacific spokesman Wayne Kirihara said Thursday the TARP money was key to the bank’s survival, and keeping banks alive was the goal of the program.

"The fact that we turned the bank around largely because of the TARP funds is proof that we were the type of bank that TARP was designed to assist," said Kirihara.

The Treasury’s sale of its remaining Central Pacific stock today will mean that the bank will be out from under TARP, Kirihara said.

"Clearly, Central Pacific had a near-death experience," said analyst Joe Gladue, who tracks Central Pacific for B. Riley & Co., a brokerage firm based in Haverford, Pa. "The money was instrumental in keeping them alive until they could raise money in the public market."

Central Pacific Financial Corp., parent of Central Pacific, raised $325 million from private equity funds in February 2011. That money strengthened the bank’s financial position and led to four straight profitable quarters. Central Pacific ended 2011 with earnings of $36.6 million compared with losses of $251 million in 2010, $313.7 million in 2009 and $138.4 million in 2008.

The Treasury plans to hold a public offering today to sell the remaining 2.77 million shares it holds of the bank’s common stock, acquired as part of the bailout. The sale represents about 7 percent of the bank’s 41.8 million outstanding shares. The company will not receive any proceeds from the sale.

"It wasn’t a loan," Kirihara said of the $135 million bailout. "It was an investment because the Treasury received shares. It was a key part in buying us the time to raise the capital."

"At that time our capital was severely depleted as a result of accelerating nonperforming loans that coincided with the financial crisis in the U.S. beginning in 2007," Kirihara said.

Based on Central Pacific’s stock closing Thursday at $13.54, the Treasury’s remaining shares would be worth $37.5 million and bring the amount received from its sale of Central Pacific stock to $73.8 million, or just more than half of the bailout.

The Treasury received $36.3 million when it sold the first half of its Central Pacific holdings, or 2.85 million shares, June 16 at $12.75 a share.

The stock sale will not dilute Central Pacific shareholders’ ownership since the Treasury’s shares were already outstanding in the market.

Central Pacific’s stock closed down 8 cents Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange before the Treasury sale was announced. In after-hours trading the shares fell an additional 59 cents, or 4.4 percent, to $12.95.

The Treasury could not be reached for comment regarding the timing of the sale today. But Kirihara said, "We do know that they are not in the business of holding long-term equity holdings in banks acquired through TARP."

The TARP bailout of Central Pacific drew attention in July 2009, when The Washington Post reported that U.S. Sen. Daniel Ino­uye’s office called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to ask about Central Pacific’s application for a bailout. Critics said the bank’s financial woes had made it a marginal candidate for receiving TARP relief and that it had gotten favorable treatment from Ino­uye. Ino­uye denied that he was attempting to influence the decision. The senator helped establish Central Pacific in 1954 and, at one time, had the bulk of his personal wealth in its stock.