In Brief: B of A Municipal Fund Trial Begins in Calif.

A trial to determine whether BankAmerica Corp. mismanaged billions of dollars of California municipal bond funds got under way late Monday, with the bank insisting it has adequate records to prove its innocence.

A BankAmerica lawyer told San Francisco Superior Court Judge A. James Robertson that a massive accounting effort equivalent to more than 200,000 hours of labor will reveal how much unclaimed principal and interest the bank owes to the state and bond issuers.

The first phase of the trial focuses on the narrow issue of the adequacy of the bank's records.

The trial stems from a lawsuit filed in 1995. The state as well as San Francisco and hundreds of other municipalities joined the suit last year. BankAmerica has denied all the allegations.

A plaintiff's attorney, Brandon Wisoff, said the bank's records were so confused that at one point they showed its municipal bond account was out of balance by $7.5 billion.

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