3 Ex-Officers at Lincoln S&L; Settle With SEC : Thrifts: In its first action connected to the S&L;’s failure, the agency filed fraud charges. The three signed a consent order but did not admit wrongdoing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, in its first legal action stemming from the failure of Lincoln Savings & Loan, filed civil fraud charges Tuesday against three former thrift officers involved in the sale of more than $250 million in bonds issued by the S&L;’s parent company.

The three--former Chairman Robin S. Symes, former President Ray C. Fidel and Dariush Razavi, a former Lincoln vice president in charge of branch operations--settled the charges by consenting to a permanent order barring them from violating federal securities laws.

Fidel and Symes have previously pleaded guilty to securities fraud in plea bargains and are considered key prosecution witnesses in the trial of their former boss, Charles H. Keating Jr., on fraud charges stemming from the bond sales.

The SEC enforcement action comes nearly five years after the agency began investigating Lincoln. The probe was prompted by thrift regulators who were suspicious of financial statements of Irvine-based Lincoln and its parent, American Continental Corp. of Phoenix.

The SEC said its investigation is continuing. The agency, which has been criticized for being lax in allowing the bond sales, previously informed Keating that he was the target of the investigation.

Symes, Fidel and Razavi agreed to cooperate with the SEC’s continuing investigation. Under the consent agreement, they did not admit to any wrongdoing and the agency did not seek restitution against them.

“Obviously, the affairs of American Continental were complex,” said John Hiler, associate director of the SEC’s enforcement division. “There are a number of enforcement and strategy reasons for the commission to consider in bringing actions.”

The suits contend that Symes, Fidel and Razavi supervised the sale of American Continental bonds to customers at Lincoln’s Southern California branches from late November, 1986, to August, 1988. The bonds were sold in separate American Continental offices for six months after that.

The SEC complaint contends that the three improperly implemented a “cross-selling” program that targeted Lincoln customers for solicitations to purchase American Continental bonds, which were technically called subordinated debentures.

The agency said the sales force, aided and abetted by Symes, Fidel and Razavi, “failed to separate the debenture sales program from the ongoing savings and loan operations of Lincoln, thereby causing debenture purchasers to believe that the debentures were thrift institution instruments or were otherwise insured by the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp.”

The SEC also alleges that the three were responsible for false statements made by employees to prospective bond buyers and for improperly paying bonuses to all employees at any branch that met a sales quota.

Finally, the agency asserts that bond sellers were unregistered brokers who knew that they were selling “unsuitable securities to many of the debenture purchasers.”

The SEC charges are similar to the issues at stake in Keating’s trial. He is charged in 20 counts of misleading investors who bought the bonds, which became worthless when Lincoln failed and American Continental filed for bankruptcy in April, 1989.

In testimony in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday, defense attorney Stephen C. Neal continued to chip away at the credibility of William K. Black, the top thrift enforcement lawyer for the West Coast region.

Black had testified that he agreed with federal regulators in San Francisco as early as July, 1986, that Lincoln didn’t have enough capital to cover possible losses from its high-risk ventures. He acknowledged that, as far as he knew, Keating wasn’t told of those concerns until a year later.

But the examination of Lincoln that led to Black’s conclusions was eventually thrown out by regulatory executives in Washington, and a new examination was started in the summer of 1988.

Neal pointed out several instances of previous testimony that Black had given before the House Banking Committee and in other sworn testimony that was contradicted by regulatory executives in Washington.

The trial continues today with Michael Patriarca, the regional director for the Office of Thrift Supervision, expected to testify.