Washington ? A Canadian bank agreed to pay $80 million to settle regulatory allegations of helping Enron Corp. manipulate its finances and defraud investors, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday.

Under the agreement, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, based in Toronto, is neither admitting or denying wrongdoing, the SEC said. The commission said it intended to order the money to go to victims of Enron’s fraud.

The SEC said that between June 1998 and October 2001, the bank and Enron structured 34 financings as “asset sales” for accounting and financing reporting purposes. That allowed the energy giant to hide from investors and rating agencies the true extent of its borrowings, the SEC said.

Enron used these disguised loans to increase earnings by more than $1 billion, to increase operating cash flows by almost $2 billion and to avoid disclosure of more than $2.6 billion in debt, the SEC said.