Ex-BCCI Official Tells of Meetings With Clifford : Banking: He testifies former defense secretary discussed business with founder of firm.

A former top employee of BCCI’s New York office testified Monday that he was present at meetings when former Secretary of Defense Clark M. Clifford and his protege Robert A. Altman discussed BCCI business with the Pakistani financier who founded the scandal-scarred bank.

Khalid Sharih testified almost a month before the bank fraud trial of Clifford and Altman is scheduled to begin because he is seriously, perhaps terminally, ill with pancreatic cancer. His statements were videotaped for later use by prosecutors.

Both Clifford and Altman were indicted last July 29 on coordinated state and federal charges they tried to hide Bank of Credit & Commerce International’s ownership of First American Bankshares Inc., the largest bank holding company in Washington. The state indictment alleged that Clifford, the bank’s chairman, and Altman, the president, accepted bribes for helping BCCI hide its illegal ownership in U.S. banks.

Sharih, who was hired by BCCI in 1979, said that he had a “relationship at a high level” with Agha Hasan Abedi, the bank’s founder, accompanying him to meetings when he was in New York. Sharih said he attended conferences in the United States and abroad where Altman was present.

Sharih said he was present in Abedi’s hotel suite in Manhattan when he met with Altman and Clifford. Sharih said the topics of the conferences included the size, growth and profits of First American.

First American owned banks in six states, including New York, where it was known as the First American Bank of New York (FABNY). Sharih testified that BCCI’s New York office worked to set up FABNY and that Altman played a key role, meeting with architects and real estate agents.

BCCI, based in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, also owned the National Bank of Georgia and the Independence Bank in Encino, Calif.

In 1991, Abedi, his deputy Swaleh Naqvi and the bank itself were indicted on broad charges including fraud, racketeering and money laundering in what Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert M. Morgenthau described as “the biggest bank fraud in world financial history.”

On July 5, 1991, bank regulators in the United States, Britain and other countries put BCCI out of business.

Sharih said that during a meeting in February of 1983 in a second-floor conference room at the Helmsley Palace hotel in Manhattan, Altman sat next to Abedi at the head table.

He added that BCCI’s founder pointed to the executives of the U.S. banks BCCI owned who were in the room and said, “We are all of the same BCCI family.”

A New York state judge ruled last week that Clifford, 85, a confidant of Democratic presidents since World War II, must stand trial in the BCCI scandal despite arguments that the strain would kill him. But Clifford, who suffers from serious heart disease, could move for a postponement and be tried separately from Altman, 45.