Clients Told of Goldinger Trades--Lawyer : Securities: The assertion may undermine claims by two firms that manager lost millions in unauthorized trades.

A lawyer for the Chicago firm that handled commodity trades for Beverly Hills financier S. Jay Goldinger said Friday that the firm mailed Goldinger’s clients detailed disclosures of his futures and options trades on their behalf.

The assertion seems to undermine claims by two corporations that they lost millions of dollars from belatedly discovered unauthorized trades by Goldinger in their accounts.

The Chicago firm is Refco Inc., a large commodities trading firm where many of Goldinger’s scores of customers held accounts. Among those customers were Tustin-based PairGain Technologies, which disclosed recently that it had lost $15.9 million from Goldinger’s trading, and Fort Worth-based Pier 1 Imports, which disclosed a loss of $20 million.

Goldinger has been unavailable for comment this week since shutting down his firm, Capital Insight, and informing investors that their accounts were being liquidated. The Refco attorney, Joseph Collins, said Goldinger’s customers had been granted full access to any remaining money in their accounts. The firm has an estimated 30 to 45 customers.

Meanwhile, Goldinger’s ex-wife, Janice Goldinger, charged that he tried to hide a portion of his millions of dollars in assets from federal authorities after he came under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission in a 1991 insider-trading case.

Janice Goldinger made the allegation in the course of the couple’s acrimonious divorce proceedings, records of which were reviewed Friday by The Times.

During the SEC probe, she contended, Goldinger told her that he wanted to “protect his assets from disclosure” to the agency. As a result, she said, he purchased “bearer bonds which could not be traced to him” and secreted them in a safe deposit box. (The SEC case was dismissed last June, but the agency has appealed.)

Goldinger flatly denied the allegations in a declaration June 9 in which he cited his ex-wife’s “continuing attempts to malign my character and her ongoing false statements about me.” He said all of his bond holdings were fully disclosed in a net-worth statement attached to the case file.

That statement, dated Sept. 30, 1993, shows that among his $7.26 million in assets were municipal bond holdings of $2.54 million and U.S. savings bonds of $156,200. Goldinger’s net worth at the time was listed as $3.43 million.

Disclosure of the allegations comes as a third publicly traded corporation disclosed a multimillion-dollar loss from Goldinger’s trading. However, that company, San Diego-based Triton Group, said its $10-million loss occurred in 1989-90--long before those cited by PairGain and Pier 1--and its relationship with Goldinger ended shortly afterward. Since then Triton, a former diversified holding company, has restructured, replaced its management, and entered and emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

Triton President Michael M. Earley said Friday that the company would reinvestigate the losses to determine if they involved unauthorized trading such as that alleged by PairGain and Pier 1.

In the PairGain and Pier 1 matters, Refco attorney Collins questioned those companies’ assertions about the extent of Goldinger’s trading authority.

“We have account authorizations from both companies authorizing Mr. Goldinger to trade futures and options without restrictions,” he said.

Moreover, Collins said, Refco mailed transaction statements directly to Goldinger’s clients on any day in which he made a trade in their accounts, as well as regular monthly statements regardless of account activity.

Accordingly, “Refco was surprised” when PairGain approached the firm in early December to say Goldinger was not authorized to trade the complicated instruments, he said, “given that [transaction] statements had been sent out since the account was opened in November 1993.”

PairGain Chief Executive Charles Strauch could not say Friday how much information the company received from Refco, or what was done with statements it did receive.

“Did I get statements? I wouldn’t know if we did or didn’t,” Strauch said from Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he is vacationing. “Even if someone got them, I would doubt they were looked at.”

He noted that such investment statements are highly technical; even when dealing with his personal investment portfolio, he said, “I get statements, I look at them, file them, and don’t understand them.”

In any event, he said, PairGain’s financial consultant--Goldinger--had been told in writing that the company’s investment policy was to buy and hold treasury securities, not trade futures and options, and that the policy was violated.