Thousand Oaks Banker Pleads Guilty to 2 Counts of Fraud : Courts: Olen B. Phillips could serve up to 24 months in prison. He had faced 12 charges in federal indictment.

Thousand Oaks banker Olen B. Phillips pleaded guilty to two counts of a 12-count indictment for bank fraud and could face up to 24 months in prison, an assistant U. S. attorney said Tuesday.

And Phillips’ banking partner, Phillip L. Chase, will enter a guilty plea today to one charge of the indictment, his attorney said.

The indictment by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles accused the two men of understating their debts when applying for loans from banks in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

In December, jurors deadlocked over eight counts in the government fraud case and acquitted Chase on one count of filing false documents.

But prosecutors renewed their case against Chase, 51, and Phillips, 53, in February, including additional charges that stemmed from an FBI investigation conducted since the mistrial, according to Assistant U. S. Atty. Brent Whittlesey.

Phillips, who is scheduled to be sentenced June 13, pleaded guilty to making a false entry into the records of the federally insured United Community Bank of Thousand Oaks, Whittlesey said.

And Phillips admitted making a materially false statement to a federally insured bank in a loan application, according to Whittlesey.

Phillips’ attorney, Steven D. Powell, declined to comment.

Chase is expected to plead guilty to “leaving off some liabilities on a financial statement,” said his attorney, Richard Marmaro. That count was related to a $50,000 loan that Chase repaid, Marmaro said.

Chase agreed to enter his plea in exchange for unsupervised probation, Marmaro said.

“He is not happy about pleading guilty, but the enormous costs of going to trial twice and the assurance of not having to serve time in prison convinced him,” Marmaro said. Chase is scheduled to appear before U. S. District Court Judge William D. Keller this morning.

The charges against Chase surrounding his activity with United Community Bank of Thousand Oaks, of which he was the chairman and Phillips a board member, are expected to be dropped as part of the plea, Marmaro said.

United Community Bank was shut down for lack of funds in 1989 and has since cost taxpayers $9.5 million to cover federally insured accounts, prosecutors said.

“My client was not guilty of any of the charges related to United Community Bank,” Marmaro said.

In the December trial, which ended in a hung jury, Chase testified that he did not know that he was breaking banking laws when he and Phillips tried to save United Community Bank by lending $300,000 to customers and borrowing the same amount back in order to buy stock.

Chase told jurors in that trial that he and Phillips were merely trying to save the bank from faltering under a load of bad loans, an alleged fraud scheme by some customers and the demands of state banking regulators.

In an unrelated case, Phillips was convicted in a 1992 state court trial of one charge from a multi-count state indictment accusing him of bilking 21 investors out of more than $3 million in complicated land deals. Phillips served a 60-day jail term in that case.