Topeka ? Thirteen years of litigation by the state’s public pension fund over investment losses concluded this week, the lead attorney said Friday.

The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System recovered $69.2 million through the litigation and netted $41.2 million after payment of attorneys’ fees and administrative costs.

In all, 13 lawsuits were filed by KPERS over investment losses that started in the late 1980s and reached $265.2 million by 1991. Among the defendants were investment advisers, attorneys and law firms.

“All the cases are settled, and all the cases are over with,” Robert Coleman, KPERS’ Chicago-based lead attorney, said Friday.

Coleman wrote to the KPERS board of trustees on Wednesday declaring all 13 cases “finally resolved.”

“We have nothing further to report to the board,” he added in the letter.

Coleman said Friday he was “disappointed in the sense that we weren’t able to recover more, but it was a positive event for the system.”

Glenn Deck, the pension fund’s executive secretary, said only $25,000 in expenses remained to be paid. KPERS has about $9 billion in assets and 240,000 participants.

“From KPERS’s perspective, we’re glad it’s over,” Deck said. “It was a chapter of our history that had been difficult.”

The losses that led to the lawsuits arose from real estate investments and investments in companies under a program designed to stimulate economic development by helping fledgling or faltering firms.

KPERS lost $38.6 million in real estate investments and $226.6 million in investments in businesses. The largest single loss was of $65 million invested in the Home Savings Assn., of Kansas City, Mo.

According to an internal report, KPERS incurred $18.4 million in legal fees and covered an additional $7.6 million in attorneys’ expenses. Operating the documents center cost $1.8 million, with other expenses amounting to about $317,000. Total expenses were about $28 million.

Legislators began investigating KPERS investments in 1991 because of concern about Home Savings’ financial condition. Federal regulators seized control of the thrift in March 1991.

But KPERS never recovered money from the investment, something Coleman said represented the biggest disappointment of the litigation.

The last major legal development in the litigation occurred in January 2000, when five Kansas City-area law firms agreed to pay $40 million to settle the pension fund claims.