Keating Denies He Tried to Get Officials Fired : Hearing: But he acknowledges taking complaints about one top official to the White House chief of staff.

WASHINGTON —  Financier Charles H. Keating Jr. on Wednesday rejected a suggestion that he tried to remove any thrift regulator who challenged him, but he acknowledged that he took his complaints about one top official as far as to the White House chief of staff.

Office of Thrift Supervision attorney James Murphy, defending the government’s April, 1989, seizure of Keating’s Lincoln Savings & Loan Assn., suggested during the hearing in U.S. District Court that Keating believed that every regulator who challenged him was motivated by personal animosity and that Keating tried to have that person fired or removed from his case.

Keating, finishing eight days of testimony in a hearing related to his suit to recover the thrift, denied that.

“Had I been listened to, this country would be $500 billion better off,” he said.

However, asked whether he had tried to get Edwin Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, fired, Keating replied: “I spoke with the Administration about it. Yes. I thought he was wrecking the industry.”

In response to a question from U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, Keating identified then-Chief of Staff Donald T. Regan as the Reagan Administration official.

Keating told reporters that he did not believe the meeting in Regan’s office influenced Regan, who he said had become unhappy with Gray long before.

Gray has said Regan tried to force him to resign before his term expired at the end of June, 1987.

The Regan meeting is only one example of the length of Keating’s political reach. Five senators who accepted political contributions from Keating are being investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee for having met with regulators on his behalf in April, 1987.

The Office of Thrift Supervision has asked Sporkin to dismiss Keating’s suit. Sporkin could eventually decide to uphold the seizure, find it invalid or order a full trial.

Earlier in his testimony Wednesday, Keating testily dismissed a government attorney’s suggestion that he had used Lincoln in an attempt to persuade Saudi investors to support his Arizona real estate ventures.

“That’s absurd!” Keating responded.

The contention that Keating used the federally insured deposits in Lincoln for his holding company, American Continental Corp. of Phoenix, is a key point in the government’s argument justifying the seizure of Lincoln. They estimate Lincoln’s collapse will cost the taxpayers $2 billion.