Ex-President of Peru Denies Links to BCCI : Banking: Alan Garcia is accused of depositing state funds for payoffs.

LIMA, Peru —  The BCCI scandal has blown up a roaring political storm in Peru, where opponents of former President Alan Garcia are attempting to link him to bribes allegedly paid in exchange for official Peruvian deposits of $270 million in the bank.

At a news conference Wednesday, Garcia called a congressional committee’s investigation of his finances “a scandalous witch hunt,” and he denied that he had anything to do with the Bank of Credit & Commerce International or any bribes.

Members of the committee admit that they have no conclusive proof of Garcia’s involvement, but they say evidence from the United States leads them to believe that he shared BCCI payoffs.

The Peruvian connection in the worldwide financial scandal has quickly become the most critical issue in Peru’s political life. Garcia, 41, belongs to the country’s strongest party, known as APRA, and he is assumed to harbor ambitions for a second term as president.

The story is dominating Peruvian news media as Garcia, his enemies and his allies jostle for position amid the publicity.

In its indictment of BCCI last week, a county grand jury in New York charged bank officials with paying about $3 million in bribes to “the two senior officials” of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank in 1986 and 1987. Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morganthau, who leads the New York investigation, identified the Peruvian officials as Leonel Figueroa, then chairman of the Central Reserve, and Hector Neyra, then director general.

Figueroa, now an economist with the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Chile, and Neyra, now associated with a consulting firm in Peru, have denied taking bribes.

The New York grand jury indictment did not charge the two Peruvians, but it said: “In 1986 and 1987, to obtain deposits from and a banking relationship with the Central Reserve Bank of Peru, defendants (Agha Hasan) Abedi and (Swaleh) Naqvi authorized and directed employees of the BCC Group to open a bank account in a Swiss bank in Panama to transmit bribes and kickbacks in the amount of a percentage of the deposits maintained by the Central Reserve Bank of Peru to the two senior officers of that bank. The total of such payments was approximately $3 million.”

Central Reserve Bank records show that the total of its deposits with BCCI in Panama reached a high of $270 million. All of the funds were later withdrawn by the official Peruvian bank.

Morganthau has not released all evidence for the bribery charge, but one document made public shows what he has termed a bank transfer of bribe money. The document, a credit report by the Swiss Bank Corp.’s branch in Panama, says $450,000 was transferred from BCCI’s Cayman Islands branch to Security Pacific International Bank to Swiss Bank Corp. in May, 1986.

The numbered Swiss Bank account in Panama that received the money apparently was one of two that allegedly were opened for Figueroa and Neyra. The accounts were given the code names Tierra Firme and Selva Negra, Spanish for Firm Land and Black Forest.

Fausto Alvarado, a member of the committee investigating Garcia in the lower house of Peru’s Congress, told The Times he believes that Garcia had access to one of the two accounts.

“This will be cleared up completely when the information is released from those two accounts, Selva Negra and Tierra Firme,” said Alvarado. He said that under Panamanian banking law, information on accounts can be released only on the request of judicial authorities.

The Peruvian attorney general’s office announced this week that a special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate the BCCI bribery allegations. Alvarado said enough evidence exists against Figueroa and Neyra, the two former Central Reserve Bank officials, to file charges against them.

The congressman expressed hope that once charges have been filed, Peruvian judicial authorities will request information from Panama on the two Swiss Bank accounts, and that the information will show who had access to the accounts. Alvarado also said he expects more evidence to be provided by the Manhattan district attorney’s office once judicial proceedings are under way here.

And he said he hopes evidence in the BCCI case will persuade the Peruvian Congress to revoke the immunity from prosecution that Garcia has as a former president and member of the Senate.

At his news conference, Garcia said he never played any part in decisions by the Central Reserve Bank on where its foreign currency reserves would be deposited.

“I have nothing to do with any bribe,” he said. “I have nothing to do, because it was not within my authority, with the placement of any currency.” Dist. Atty. Morganthau has said Garcia was “consulted” about the deposits, but Garcia denied that.

Garcia dismissed as meaningless a memorandum in which BCCI representative Alberto Calvo reported in July, 1987, to a BCCI official in Miami that an adviser to Garcia had offered to set up a meeting between Calvo and Garcia. The former president said he never met with a BCCI representative.

He denied rumors that former Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega had introduced Noriega’s BCCI banker to Garcia.

The congressional committee investigating Garcia issued a report three months ago alleging that the former president had 10 accounts in foreign banks with a total of $50 million. He said he has obtained letters from the 10 banks certifying that Garcia had no funds in them.

The panel’s attempt to link Garcia to BCCI bribes “is a new lie that comes from falsifiers and delinquents who have had no scruples in inventing documents,” he said.

The chairman of the committee is Fernando Olivera, an independent politician who based his 1990 election campaign on allegations of corruption in Garcia’s administration. Garcia said the allegations are part of a strategy by “political groups that need to gain ground.”

The congressional committee’s allegations are expected to be debated in the Chamber of Deputies when it opens a new session next week. The Senate, which opened its session Tuesday, appointed another committee to investigate allegations of BCCI corruption.

Political analyst Fernando Rospigliosi said that if the allegations lead to legal sanctions, it will be a novelty in Peru.

But he predicted that the Garcia-BCCI scandal, called “Alangate” by one Peruvian magazine, will not go away soon.

“This is going to drag out for a long time,” he said. “It won’t be a matter of weeks but of many months. Alan Garcia has many enemies, and they will make it their business to keep the thing alive to affect him politically.”

In another development, the Associated Press reported from San Francisco that a federal class-action suit that seeks to recoup billions of dollars deposited in BCCI alleges that Bank of America, among others, failed to disclose BCCI’s alleged illegal activities.

A spokesman for Bank of America, which helped found BCCI in 1972, strongly denied the allegations Wednesday and said the bank will seek quick dismissal of the suit, characterizing it as “a flagrant attempt to assign guilt by association,” the AP reported.

The complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco appears to be the first comprehensive civil filing in the scandal.

It charges 20 defendants with conspiracy, fraud, racketeering and political influence-peddling.