Tampa attorney Jonathan Alpert takes full credit for turning the feds onto a NationsBank securities fraud in the 1990s, a case that led to a class action settlement and a $6.75 million fine for the bank.

But Alpert says Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink had no role in the scheme, which led investors to believe they were buying no-risk savings accounts rather than mutual funds and stocks that could and did lose value. In a phone interview this afternoon, Alpert blasted Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott for campaign ads blaming Sink for the fines.

“Those orders came down from (NationsBank’s headquarters in) Charlotte, not from her,” Alpert said. “It’s not a legitimate issue, because she didn’t have anything to do with it.”

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UPDATE: Alex Sink’s campaign spokeswoman Kyra Jennings calls Scott’s ad a lie.

“This is just one more deceptive ad from Rick Scott. The facts are that this is a company Alex Sink flat-out did not run and even the lawyer from the suit mentioned in Scott’s ad said today that Alex Sink was not involved in any way. But obviously Rick Scott has a very hard time telling the truth and can’t be trusted,” Jennings said in an e-mail.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott released a new attack ad today slamming Democrat opponent Alex Sink for $6.75 million in fines her former bank was forced to pay the federal government for selling risky investments, mostly to seniors.

NationsBank and its securities division was also forced to repay $30 million to customers duped into buying the investments. Sink was head of NationsBank’s Florida operations.

Scott’s ad comes after Sink, the state’s chief financial officer, and Democrats have run ads for weeks raising questions about Scott’s role in $1.7 billion fines levied by the federal government against his hospital chain for fraud.

The Republican Governors Association hammered Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, the state’s presumptive Democratic candidate for governor and former banker.

The ad is the RGA’s first TV campaign for the 2010 election season and shows that the Florida governor’s race will be one of the premier gubernatorial battles in the country.

Attorney General Bill McCollum is facing off against long-shot state Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, in a GOP primary.

The ad charges that Sink did away with thousands of jobs while president of Florida’s NationsBank operations while earning $8 million in salary and bonuses, capitalizing on the current animosity toward bankers who took billions of dollars in federal bail-out money, spent much of it on executive bonuses and did little to ease the nation’s credit crunch.

The RGA also launched a new website – alexsinksflorida.com – featuring the video, which ends “Alex Sink. Not one of us. One of them.”

Sink was head of NationsBank in Florida when the financial institution acquired Barnett Bank, in 1998, for $62 billion. The merger resulted in the loss of 6,000 jobs, many of them in Florida, according to the ad.