A federal appeals court has refused to revisit the guilty pleas of a former Topeka bank officer convicted of bank fraud along with former Westar Energy Inc. Chief Executive David Wittig.

Clinton Odell Weidner II, former president of Capital City Bank, and Wittig were found guilty in 2003 of hiding a $1.5 million loan from bank and regulatory officials.

On the first day of the trial, Weidner pleaded guilty to two of six counts against him. He later claimed he was pressured to plead guilty by his lead defense attorney, Pedro Irigonegaray, and sought to have the guilty pleas thrown out.

In his appeal, Weidner said Irigonegaray refused to call the bank’s owner, Frank Sabatini, as a defense witness and said his attorney’s relationship with Sabatini and the bank may have affected his judgment.

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson refused to dismiss the pleas, however, saying Weidner entered the pleas voluntarily and hadn’t provided enough evidence of a conflict of interest by Irigonegaray.

Robinson sentenced Weidner to 6 and a half years in prison, but an appeals decision forced her to reduce it in April to five years.

Weidner asked the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver to overturn Robinson’s refusal of his appeal, saying she should have held an evidentiary hearing.

But a three-judge panel on Monday refused to hear his appeal, saying “the issues he seeks to raise on appeal are not adequate to deserve further proceedings.”

Weidner’s defense attorney, Bruce Simon, said Tuesday that he is still appealing the five-year sentence as too harsh.

The bank case involved a $1.5 million loan Wittig gave to Weidner after Weidner increased Wittig’s personal line of credit at the bank by the same amount. Prosecutors said the two men conspired to hide the loan and Weidner used the money to invest in a residential development in Scottsdale, Ariz.

They also claimed Wittig planned to use the loan as a way to get additional loans in the future for him and other Westar officials to invest in a planned spin-off of the Topeka-based utility.

That spin-off was eventually nixed by Kansas regulators and served as the centerpiece of Wittig’s conviction last year on 39 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, circumventing internal controls and money laundering as part of a scheme to loot Westar.

The 10th Circuit is considering an appeal of that case.