BANKING/FINANCE

New counts possible Keating may face more federal criminal charges--perhaps as soon as today--in Arizona.

A federal grand jury in Phoenix has been looking into the possibility that he may have directed a looting of property from the Phoenix headquarters of Lincoln’s parent company, American Continental Corp., in mid-1990.

Early on Aug. 24, 1990, James J. Feder, the lead bankruptcy lawyer for American Continental, told U.S. District Judge Richard M. Bilby in a closed-door session that for several weeks company workers had been taking property out of the corporate headquarters to a warehouse Keating had rented nearby.

Feder said that his information sparked an FBI probe. The events also happened to come on the day that a federal judge in Washington rejected Keating’s challenge of the federal takeover of Lincoln and accused the Phoenix developer of “looting” Lincoln through accounting shenanigans.

After receiving Feder’s news, Bilby called in lawyers for Keating and his top aides and gave them the option of having the corporate officers quit or having the court remove them, Feder said. They resigned.