Entrepreneur Faces 2 Lawsuits Over Computer Sales to Soviets : Trade: Camarillo businessman Ed Malik also intends to buy an Arizona bank so that he can open a branch in Moscow.

Ed Malik has big plans. An entrepreneur who’s already selling computers to the Soviet Union through his Camarillo company Americomp USA, Malik is now close to buying a tiny Arizona bank for $3 million. Why? So he can open a branch office in Moscow that could help expand his Soviet trade, he says.

But along with his expansion plans, Malik has some legal problems to deal with. Two U.S. companies have filed suits this summer in Superior Court in Los Angeles and Ventura, alleging that Malik owes them a total of more than $1 million and refuses to pay.

Imperial Global Trading Co., a division of Imperial Bank in Los Angeles, is suing him for fraud and breach of contract and is seeking $1 million. That’s the amount Imperial Global claims Malik owes it for arranging a computer sale to the Soviets in December, 1989.

Malik also is being sued by Craftsman Electronics Inc., an Atlanta company that made Soviet-bound computers for him in both the Imperial deal and a separate transaction this past March. Craftsman claims Malik owes it $165,000.

Malik not only denies any wrongdoing in both cases, he has countersued Craftsman in Ventura and is seeking $7 million in damages. His lawyer, Jacob J. Stettin, said he has not yet filed a formal response to Imperial Global’s suit.

Regardless, Malik blames the Imperial Global dispute on Imperial Global, contending that it did not live up to the terms of their contract and cost Malik an additional $12.6-million contract with the Soviet Union.

Malik’s Americomp is part of Perestroika USA, a company that the India-born Malik co-founded in 1985. Malik plans to assemble 16,500 personal computers in Camarillo for sale to the Soviet Union under two new contracts valued at a combined $45 million, he said last month in a Times story.

Malik said he had been selling various goods in the Soviet Union for several years, as Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika economic reforms took hold. He said he set up his own manufacturing plant in Camarillo because he was unhappy with the quality of computers he was buying from the Far East for shipment to Moscow.

Now Malik wants to get into banking. He has signed a letter of intent to purchase Republic National Bank in Phoenix, a small, single-office bank with $28 million in assets, Republic President Thomas J. Euen confirmed.

He said Malik approached the bank a month ago, and the parties are negotiating a definitive takeover agreement. The bank is privately held, but the research firm Sheshunoff & Co. in Austin, Tex., said Republic National lost $1.5 million in 1989 before earning a $79,000 profit in this year’s first quarter.

According to Imperial’s suit, in late 1989 Malik agreed to arrange the sale of 525 computers to a Soviet agency for $1.4 million. To pay for the machines, Malik got a letter of credit--a type of payment guarantee--from a Soviet bank and took it to Imperial, which agreed to buy the computers on his behalf and ship them to the Soviet Union. Imperial was to be repaid by the Soviet bank that issued the letter of credit, the suit contends.

Imperial said that on Malik’s instructions, it bought the first 200 computers from Craftsman and shipped them. (Craftsman is not a big name in computers; it buys components from other manufacturers and assembles them into finished computers.) Imperial said the Soviets were supposed to pay Imperial $320,000 for those machines, but Malik “got paid instead of us,” said Anthony Shen, Imperial Global’s president.

Shen said he expected Malik to forward the cash. “Instead, he refused to give us the money,” Shen said.

Imperial, meanwhile, had bought the other 325 computers from Craftsman but refused to ship them until it got paid for the first shipment, Shen said. But it never got paid in either case, so now Imperial is trying to sell the remaining computers elsewhere, he said.

Malik said that Imperial, by failing to ship all 525 computers within time limits, invalidated the letter of credit, and that Imperial is “not entitled to the money.” He said the Craftsman computers were “junk” and most failed to work. That prompted the Soviets to cancel the $12.6-million contract, he said. “Imperial is totally responsible for us losing that contract,” he said.

Shen said Imperial “bought the computers as he ordered. We don’t guarantee if they work or not.”

Nicholas Tzavaras, Craftsman chief operating officer, defended his company’s computers and said it tried to send technicians to Moscow to look at the machines. Tzavaras said Craftsman needed an invitation from Malik to get into the country, but Malik did not provide one.

Imperial’s suit also alleged that Malik hyped his personal background when he approached Imperial about doing business. (The suit listed Malik’s full name as Akhter Malik Mokhamed.) The financial statement that he gave Imperial “significantly overstated” Malik’s credentials, net worth and credit worthiness, the suit alleged without elaborating.

“It was such a rush we did not check it out,” Shen said. But he said Malik’s financial situation mattered little. What counted was the letter of credit he had from the Soviet bank, and on that basis Imperial accepted the deal, he said.

Some facts Malik gave in interviews with The Times also proved slippery. Among other things, Malik said he had a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--a claim he also made to Imperial--but MIT has no record of him attending. Told of this, Malik later elaborated to say his degree was from the University of Bombay in India “under the auspices” of MIT, but that could not be immediately confirmed.

He also told The Times that he had countersued Imperial and was seeking $27 million in damages. But later Malik’s lawyer, Stettin, said no such action had been taken.

Beyond the courts, Malik is waiting to see if regulators give him the green light to buy the Phoenix bank. A Moscow office would “facilitate our Soviet customers and trading customers” by offering letters of credit and other financing, he said.

Chase Manhattan Bank, the giant New York City bank, is one of the few U.S. banks that has an office in Moscow. Such Moscow branches provide mainly trade financing. Peter Bakstansky, a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said U.S. banks are free to try to set up shop there, but it’s still not easy to get Moscow’s approval despite perestroika.