(FORTUNE Magazine) – Imagine a corporate client charging Sanford Weill, CEO of Citigroup and one of the world's grand banking leaders, with fraud and conspiracy. You can easily envision a bunch of screaming headlines from the nation's business press.

Now, back to reality. In the first circuit court of Hawaii, the Japanese equivalent of Weill, Masao Nishimura, president of the Industrial Bank of Japan (IBJ), has been accused of committing these very offenses by one of IBJ's clients, Japanese golf-course developer Tokyo Green. But Hawaii is not New York; Nishimura is not Sandy Weill; and even though IBJ will become part of the world's largest bank when it merges with Dai-Ichi Kangyo and Fuji Bank later this year, it is not Citigroup. (Right now it's the 15th-largest bank on FORTUNE's Global 500 list.) So the press has been remarkably silent. Until now.

The case is composed of a morass of legal documents spanning a decade. According to Tokyo Green's complaint, IBJ approached the company in 1990 with an offer to invest in a Hawaiian golf property being developed by Takeshi Sekiguchi. The bank offered to lend Tokyo Green $50 million that would buy a 47.5% stake in Sekiguchi's project. But IBJ failed to disclose Sekiguchi's shaky financial history: He had accumulated almost $1 billion in debt and was close to defaulting on a $250 million loan from IBJ used for another of his projects. The complaint alleges that Tokyo Green's $50 million never made it to the golf course but instead was used to pay down the debt on Sekiguchi's other developments. Tokyo Green asserts that if Sekiguchi had defaulted on his $250 million loan, IBJ would have been in violation of international banking laws and would no longer have been able to issue new loans. The complaint singles out Nishimura, then the director of IBJ's Business Coordination Committee.

In 1997, after six years of legal wrangling, Tokyo Green filed suit against IBJ and Sekiguchi. The trial began in Honolulu earlier this month. Edward Jaffe, a lawyer for Tokyo Green, says his clients stand behind their allegations, and he "expects to offer compelling evidence at trial." He estimates that punitive damages in the case could be as high as $100 million.

Richard Clifton, IBJ's legal representative, calls Tokyo Green's case a sham. In IBJ's version of events, it was Tokyo Green that approached the bank, not the other way around. "[Tokyo Green] lost a lot of money as a result of the Asian financial crisis, and it's looking for a way out," he says. "I don't think the claim has any merit whatsoever."