KANSAS CITY, KAN. ? Westar Energy Inc. lost more than $1.6 million in 2002 when it sold a corporate jet the utility had owned for only two months, a witness testified Monday in the federal fraud trial of former company CEO David Wittig.

Leroy Wages, Westar’s controller, said the Topeka-based company sold the Cessna Citation X in March 2002 for $17.2 million. The company, the largest electric utility in Kansas, had acquired the plane for around $18 million and had taken delivery of the plane two months before.

Wages testified that the $1.6 million figure included a $616,000 hit in the value of the plane, as well as lease payments and fees to brokers in the sale.

He said the decision to buy the plane came from Wittig.

Prosecutors say Wittig, Westar’s former chief executive officer, and co-defendant Douglas Lake, a former Westar executive vice president, used company planes for personal trips and didn’t disclose the use to company officials or declare the trips on their tax returns.

They say Wittig recommended Westar buy the plane because it was capable of international travel, which the company’s Citation VII planes were not. They claim Wittig used the company’s Citation X for a family vacation to Europe.

Wages testified that he was told the company wanted to replace one of the Citation VIIs with the Citation X and ordered the plane a year in advance.

He told Wittig’s attorney, Paula Junghans, that he didn’t know why the company decided to sell the plane, but her questioning indicated the company discovered after ordering the plane that ending its lease of the Citation VII would be prohibitively expensive.

Wages is only the second witness in the trial, which is expected to last 10 weeks. Wittig and Lake are charged with looting the company of millions during their tenure.

Earlier in the day, former Westar chief administrative officer Carl Koupal criticized an internal investigation that Wittig spearheaded in 2001 to discover if any employees were providing internal information to the media. The company worried that negative stories about its executives’ compensation were hurting its stock price and endangering a proposed merger with a New Mexico utility.