Longtime Lafayette businessman, UL donor Mike Maraist dies

by Adam Daigle

Acadiana business editor

Mike Maraist, a longtime Lafayette-area banker, businessman and owner of Le Triomphe Golf & Country Club in Broussard, has died.

The longtime businessman whose $2.5 million donation to the Moody College of Business at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette provided for the Maraist Financial Services Lab had a history that spanned decades in the Lafayette region.

It was thru Maraist’s donation that in 2018 UL opened its 11,780-square-foot financial services lab inside F.G. Mouton Hall. It opened with 24 computer workstations, 12 Bloomberg terminals, electronic ticker tape display, digital data board and television monitors for business and financial news.

Maraist, a 1971 graduate, made the donation in honor of his family, which featured three generations who attended the university.

Maraist was the owner of Timco Services, an oilfield services company that was sold to Frank’s International in 2015. In 2016, he was honored as Entrepreneur of the Year by the publication ABiz, which for years honored business leaders for “innovation, job creation and potential for job creation, vision, leadership, expansion, financial performance and community involvement,” the report indicated.

At that time Maraist was board chairman at Home Bank.

His background in banking began decades earlier. At only age 24, he was named president of Acadiana Bank in Eunice and was the youngest bank president in the country. His father, Louis, had spent about 50 years in the industry and led banks in St. Martinville and Morgan City.

After a few years, amid a downturn in the oil and gas industry in the 1980s, Maraist left banking and began to purchase struggling oilfield service companies.

He has real estate holdings in Texas and New Mexico. His most notable local property is Le Triomphe Golf & Country Club in Broussard, which he purchased in 2000.

He oversaw a $3 million renovation of the complex in 2003. The course has hosted the Chitimacha Louisiana Open for 30 years and has been regarded as one of the best tournament stops on the PGA Tour.

“We are talking about a downright super person, a very compassionate and caring person,” Lafayette Parish Councilman John Guilbeau wrote. “His smile was infectious. No finer gentleman.”