The man police say may be connected to a high-profile hostess-abduction case pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of drugging and raping two other foreign women.

The plea came in the first trial hearing before the Tokyo District Court for Joji Obara, a 48-year-old president of an asset-management company in Tokyo. Obara denied drugging and raping one woman in March 1996 and the other in October 1997 at his condominium in Zushi, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The names and nationalities of the women were withheld in court. They were formerly identified by police as a 23-year-old Canadian and a Briton in her 20s. Obara has also been linked to missing hostess Lucie Blackman, a Briton.

While admitting he engaged in "sex play" with both of the women at the condominium, Obara, an unmarried native of Osaka, claimed the encounters were based on mutual consent and that he paid a "monetary reward" to the women.

Obara, clad in dark-gray suit and black shirt, said, "I have never engaged in sex play without consent or used any drug (for that purpose)."

Initially arrested on Oct. 12 for allegedly drugging and raping the Canadian woman, Obara was subsequently charged with committing the same offense against the other foreign woman. He was later indicted for sexually assaulting a Japanese woman in her 30s in May and was served another warrant for allegedly assaulting another Japanese woman in her 20s in June.

Thursday's trial session focused on the charges of assault against the Canadian woman and the British woman.

Prosecutors said Obara invited one of the foreign women, whom he met at a bar in Tokyo's Roppongi entertainment district in Minato Ward, to his seaside condominium on March 31, 1996. There he served her wine containing a sleep-inducing drug and forced her to inhale an anesthetic, they said.

After she passed out, Obara raped her and videotaped the encounter, prosecutors said.

On Oct. 10, 1997, Obara invited the other foreign hostess from Roppongi to the condominium, drugged her, raped her and videotaped the assault in a similar manner, prosecutors said.

Obara gave the first woman 60,000 yen and the second one 20,000 yen when they left his condominium and paid for their cab fare back to Tokyo, they added.

Both women were unconscious when they were raped and believed Obara when he claimed that they had drunk too much and passed out and that nothing else had happened, prosecutors said.

It wasn't until the Blackman case was reported that the Canadian woman came forward about the assault. There are similarities in events that led up to the disappearance of Blackman and her own experiences, prosecutors quoted the Canadian woman as saying.

Blackman's roommate reported her missing after she failed to return to their Shibuya Ward apartment from an outing on July 1. It was the roommate's understanding that she had met a man at the club where she worked who had asked her out for a drive to the beach.

Blackman, a former British Airways flight attendant, was 21 years old when she disappeared.

The Canadian woman filed a complaint with police against Obara in October and police later confirmed that she was on a videotape confiscated during their investigation, prosecutors said.

The other foreign woman filed a complaint after police showed her another confiscated videotape showing her being assaulted by Obara, they said.

Since his initial arrest, police have reportedly seized sleeping drugs and more than 100 videotapes, several featuring sexual assaults on Caucasian women. Investigative sources said more than 50 women appear on the tapes.

Police have reportedly been pressing Obara on Blackman but have yet to acquire any evidence to link him to her disappearance. Obara told reporters last month through his lawyer that he was served by Blackman once at her club but that he had nothing to do with her disappearance.

During Thursday's session, Yoshinori Hamaguchi, a lawyer representing Obara, argued that police served his client with four arrest warrants in an effort to keep him detained over the Blackman case. He has been held for more than 60 days.

Hamaguchi also denounced the media for spreading the image of Obara as being involved in Blackman's disappearance.

Obara, the second son of a wealthy Osaka family with large landholdings in Osaka and a taxi company, was detained and fined for videotaping a woman in a beach lavatory in Wakayama Prefecture in 1998. He gave police a false name at the time. After his October arrest, police learned that he had been using several aliases.

During the bubble economy in the late 1980s, he set up nine companies, mainly dealing with asset management, but after the burst of the bubble, many of them went bankrupt and most of his real estate was seized by lenders.

Blackman's case has caught the attention of domestic and international media through the efforts of her father and sister. An anonymous donor has offered a 77 million yen reward for information leading to the discovery of her whereabouts.