BCCI Officials Hid Noriega Funds, U.S. Charges : Finance: Indictment alleges six bankers concealed money for the ex-dictator and laundered millions in drug profits.

A former president of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International and five other BCCI officials have been charged with laundering millions of dollars in drug profits as well as money belonging to former Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega.

The federal indictment, unsealed Thursday in Tampa after an international manhunt netted one of the former bankers in France, describes BCCI as a corrupt organization set up to launder illicit funds through its worldwide branches.

“What we are alleging in this indictment is a racketeering enterprise in a manner that was a corporate strategy, a corporately countenanced operation,” Robert S. Mueller III, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division, told reporters here.

BCCI, which had branches in 73 countries and assets of $20 billion at its zenith, was virtually shut down by banking regulators on July 5 after auditors discovered evidence that widespread fraud had led to losses of at least $5 billion.

The new racketeering and money-laundering charges are the latest in a series of allegations that BCCI was riddled with corruption.

The bank and its former top officers face state criminal charges in New York, and federal grand juries in three other cities are investigating the bank, including its alleged secret acquisition of four U.S. financial institutions.

Accused in the Tampa indictment of supervising money-laundering by lower-level employees was Swaleh Naqvi, who became president of BCCI in 1988 after its founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, suffered a heart attack.

Besides Naqvi and five other bankers, five reputed members of the Medellin drug cartel were charged in the indictment.

The three-count indictment portrays BCCI as a bank built on money-laundering in Latin America. It provides new details of the bank’s relationship with Noriega and describes meetings in which bankers discussed ways to get more drug deposits in Panama and Colombia.

When an employee suggested closing drug-related accounts at the Panama branch in 1988, defendant Bashir Shaikh, assistant manager of the branch, responded that doing so would mean that BCCI might as well shut down the entire Panama operation, according to the charges.

Justice Department officials said that the indictment is the result of a continuing investigation that led to the bank’s guilty plea to money-laundering and to the conviction of five of its officers in Tampa last year.

The new charges rely heavily on testimony by the former BCCI officials convicted in that case, who are cooperating with prosecutors.

The Justice Department has been criticized in Congress for failing to pursue BCCI aggressively. Mueller and Tampa prosecutor Gregory Kehoe said the new round of charges demonstrates the agency’s continuing commitment to the case.

However, the indictment is likely to add to the criticism because the bank itself was not charged. As part of the bank’s earlier guilty plea, the U.S. attorney’s office in Tampa agreed not to prosecute the bank further.

A report issued Thursday by Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and a House Judiciary Committee panel criticized the Justice Department and other federal agencies for not aggressively pursuing leads about the bank.

The 46-page indictment released Thursday was returned by a Tampa grand jury on Aug. 23. It was kept sealed until after the arrest Tuesday of Syed Z. A. Akbar in the French port of Calais as he stepped off a ferry from Britain.

None of the other 10 defendants is in custody, Mueller said. Naqvi is believed to be in the Persian Gulf country of Abu Dhabi and may be under house arrest. The royal family of Abu Dhabi acquired control of the bank last year and is struggling to save it.

The Colombian defendants are in their country, which has outlawed extradition to the United States. Mueller said the Justice Department is considering turning over the evidence to Bogota in the hope that the defendants would be tried there. He also suggested the defendants might be arrested in a country with an extradition treaty.

Syed Akbar, who ran BCCI’s trading operations until 1986, was accused of assisting in the bank’s efforts in 1988 to conceal $23 million belonging to Noriega. At the time, Akbar was operating Capcom Financial Services, a brokerage firm with offices in London and the United States, which was also indicted Thursday.

In recent weeks, Akbar has emerged as a major figure in the widening BCCI scandal. An audit of the bank by the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse disclosed last June that Akbar had received $32 million from BCCI in exchange for keeping quiet about wrongdoing at the bank. He has denied that the money was a payoff and portrayed himself in recent interviews as a scapegoat.

Akbar and Capcom were charged in 1988 in the first BCCI case in Tampa. Those charges, however, were dismissed so that Akbar could be prosecuted by the British for money-laundering. He was convicted in London in 1990 and served six months in prison.

The new indictment provides additional details about BCCI’s relationship with Noriega, whose trial on drug charges began Thursday in Miami.

Noriega opened a secret account with BCCI in Panama in 1982 and used it as a slush fund to finance travel and shopping by himself and his family. After his Miami indictment in 1988, the new charges say, Noriega arranged through a BCCI banker to move the $23 million in his BCCI account.

The banker was not identified in the indictment, but sources confirmed that it was Amjad Awan, who handled Noriega’s account at BCCI. Awan was convicted of money-laundering in the Tampa case last year and is cooperating with federal prosecutors. He is expected to testify at Noriega’s trial.

According to the indictment, Awan traveled to London and met with Naqvi and other bank executives to discuss how to hide Noriega’s money. First, the money was moved through another bank to make it harder to trace and then it was deposited in BCCI’s Luxembourg office.

Awan later arranged another layer of secrecy by setting up an account with Akbar at Capcom and depositing Noriega’s money there, according to the indictment. The government of Panama recently filed a lawsuit in London in an effort to recover the money.

Thursday’s indictment is not as broad as the criminal charges filed against the bank, Naqvi and Abedi in late July by Robert M. Morgenthau, the district attorney in New York City. There, the bank and its former executives are accused of bribing officials in Peru and misrepresenting the bank’s financial condition along with money-laundering.

Morgenthau’s office and a federal grand jury in Washington are investigating whether former defense secretary Clark M. Clifford and his law partner, Robert Altman, were aware of BCCI’s ownership of First American throughout the 1980s when the two men served as BCCI’s lawyers and as the top executives of First American. Clifford and Altman have said that they did not know.

Other matters under investigation include BCCI’s acquisition of a stake in CenTrust Savings, a failed thrift in Miami, and lobbying activities in Georgia in connection with BCCI’s hidden purchase of a bank there.