A foreign national with ties to a top Florida Republican fundraiser has been indicted in California for steering illegal campaign contributions to Gov. Charlie Crist and three presidential candidates.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Ala'a al-Ali of the Dominican Republic with using straw donors to give $5,000 to Crist's 2006 campaign, and more than $50,000 to presidential candidates John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Al-Ali later repaid the donors, thereby avoiding contribution limits, the indictment says.

Al-Ali, 37, works for an international shipping company owned by Boca Raton's Harry Sargeant III, a longtime Crist confidant who until last month served as the finance chairman for the state GOP.

Al-Ali has not yet been arrested, and he has not responded to the charges. Prosecutors believe he is in the Dominican Republic.

Sargeant, also one of McCain's top fundraisers, was not named in the indictment. The indictment does say that al-Ali had campaign checks delivered to a person identified as ''H.S.,'' but prosecutors would not say if this is a reference to Sargeant.

Sargeant did not return phone calls to his offices on Thursday.

The federal investigation, which is still ongoing, has focused on a series of conspicuous donations from Arab-Americans living near Riverside, Calif., including more than three dozen contributions to Crist on June 19, 2006.

When interviewed by The Miami Herald last year, one of the donors said she didn't know who Crist was, and insisted that she and her husband gave no money to the governor's campaign -- though records showed they donated $1,000.

''We never made any donations. I have no idea what you are talking about,'' homemaker Jihan Nassar of Corona, Calif., told The Herald in August.

The indictment says al-Ali repaid the Nassars, who are not accused of wrongdoing, for the contributions.

In addition to concealing the donations, al-Ali is also accused of violating a federal law banning foreign nationals from contributing to political campaigns. Al-Ali is a citizen of both the Dominican Republic and Jordan.

Crist, in Jupiter Thursday for the opening of the Scripps Research Institute, said he knew nothing about any fundraising by al-Ali. The governor said he had not been contacted by investigators.

Crist's former campaign manager, George LeMieux, said he personally reviewed all the campaign donations to ensure the donors were properly identified, and the donations were not over the state limit of $500 per person.

''We did everything that we could, and I believe we did comply with Florida law,'' said LeMieux, a Tallahassee attorney. ``We had, I think, close to 20,000 contributors in the primary alone, so we obviously didn't call each one of them up.''

LeMieux said he saw no reason for Crist to return the questionable donations; the campaign account closed, and the money all spent.

Many of Crist's questionable California donors also gave money to the campaigns of Giuliani, Clinton and McCain in 2007 and 2008. The McCain campaign attributed these donations to Sargeant's fundraising before returning them in August.

At the time, Sargeant said these donations were solicited by a business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba'a. Like al-Ali, Abu Naba'a is a Jordanian living in the Dominican Republic.

Sargeant and Crist have been friends since college, when they were fraternity brothers at Florida State University. When campaigning for the governor's office in 2006, Crist often flew on a private plane owned by one of Sargeant's companies. Sargeant accompanied Crist on a trade mission to Jordan and Israel in 2007.

At the governor's urging, Sargeant became the head fundraiser for the state Republican Party; his family and companies have donated more than $1 million to the Florida GOP in the past two years, records show. Sargeant stepped down as finance chairman last month.

With Abu Naba'a, Sargeant also heads a company that has earned more than $1.4 billion from the Defense Department for shipping oil through Jordan to Iraq to supply the U.S. military. Last year, a congressional committee accused the company of ''apparent profiteering,'' and urged the Pentagon to investigate its contracts.

In a letter to The Washington Post before the committee released its findings, Sargeant defended his company's handling of the Defense Department contracts. ''We have nothing to hide,'' he wrote.

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