Huang’s 70 Phone Calls Questioned

A Democratic fund-raiser under investigation in the controversy over foreign-linked donations made at least 70 calls from his government office to a Los Angeles bank owned by his former Indonesian employer, according to telephone logs obtained on Monday.

John Huang, an ex-Commerce Department official from Glendale, also made a series of calls to prominent businessmen in Arkansas and people with extensive financial interests in Asia, the records and interviews show.

The contacts are revealed in logs of outgoing telephone calls made by Huang in 1994 and 1995 when he worked as principal deputy assistant Commerce secretary for international economic policy. The agency has refused to publicly release the documents, but turned them over to the House International Relations Committee.

The new records intensify questions about whether Huang was helping his former employer, along with politically connected associates and major Democratic donors, while he was in a government job that provided access to top-secret information on U.S. trade policy.

“Clearly this information is highly relevant to the allegations that surfaced late in the presidential campaign about questionable fund-raising practices involving John Huang,” Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), chairman of the international relations panel, wrote Monday in a letter to Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor.

A Commerce Department spokesperson declined to comment on the phone records.

To date, the Democratic National Committee has returned a total of nearly $770,000 in illegal or questionable contributions. Most of the funds were solicited by Huang, including $250,000 from a South Korean company, after he became a full-time DNC fund-raiser in December 1995.

The Justice Department, the Federal Election Commission and the Commerce Department’s inspector general are all probing various aspects of Huang’s activities. In addition, 11 congressional committees are looking into Huang’s actions at Commerce and the DNC, and hearings are planned shortly after the new Congress begins in January.

Huang was an executive at LippoBank in Los Angeles, owned by Indonesian financier James Riady, before joining the Commerce Department in the summer of 1994.

The records obtained Monday reveal that Huang placed at least seven calls from his Commerce office to Lippo’s main Los Angeles number in May of last year. Those calls came about the same time that Huang had a scheduled conference with an official of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which had imposed a cease-and-desist order on LippoBank for an assortment of financial shortcomings.

The FDIC is conducting an internal inquiry of that conference and other telephone contacts to determine whether there were attempts to compromise the agency’s supervision of LippoBank. The cease-and-desist order was lifted in March 1996.

In all, Huang made at least 70 calls to LippoBank between July 1994 and December of last year. James Per Lee, the bank’s president and chief executive officer since 1994, said Huang’s calls could not have been to senior bank officials.

“I polled all the senior officers in the bank and [Huang] didn’t talk to any of us,” Per Lee said Monday. He suggested that many of Huang’s calls could have been placed through a switchboard number at the bank and then routed to the offices of the Lippo Group, the Riady family’s worldwide conglomerate, which maintains space on the same floor as the bank in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles.

Per Lee said that he did not speak with Huang more than once or twice during the time that Huang was at the Commerce Department.

The phone messages show that Huang received calls from Julian Liu, who had previously worked with Huang at a Riady bank in Arkansas. “John was his mentor or career advisor,” Per Lee said.

Times staff writer Alan C. Miller contributed to this story.