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Of all the financial implosions in the eurozone, few matched last year’s collapse of tiny Cyprus in terms of drama and chaos.

Frantic Cypriots queued up at banks to drain their accounts. Russian oligarchs scrambled to repatriate hidden fortunes. European officials, fearing another bout of market contagion, orchestrated an audacious 17 billion euro rescue package — forcing depositors to bear a large part of the cost, unlike other bailouts.

Now, the foundation of the bailout, an analysis by bond giant Pimco, is being challenged by economists, lawyers and politicians in Cyprus. They argue that the analysis relied too heavily on aggressive financial assumptions that in some cases deviated from international accounting standards, thus inflating how much cash banks needed to survive.

The basis for the criticism comes from an unusual source: a separate BlackRock study commissioned by the Cypriot central bank shortly before Pimco issued its report. The central bank chief, voicing concerns over Pimco’s models and its approach, asked BlackRock, the world’s largest investor, to dissect the work of its rival.

The BlackRock study, which has never been publicly released and was reviewed by The New York Times, suggests that the banks’ needs were €1 billion less than Pimco’s estimate of €8.8 billion; central bank officials did not brief the new Cypriot government on the report’s existence at the time of bailout negotiations in March 2013. Government investigators, who have continued to delve into the matter, say capital requirements were even lower, just over €6 billion.

Over the last year, the island has been swept up by Watergate-style hearings with many of the principal actors in the economy’s collapse and subsequent rescue. Beyond the calumny and conspiracy theories, one question has persisted: Did Pimco succumb to pressure from the central bank and the three bodies lending money to Cyprus — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and European Commission — to punish the banks by inflating their cash needs?

In Cyprus, the wound from the bailout — financial as well as psychic — remains raw.

Some economists believe that the country’s depositors, many of whom lost their life savings, suffered needlessly.

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Stoking Cypriot anger is the fact that the Pimco report was used by European officials to justify the rock-bottom price that Greece’s nearly bankrupt Piraeus Bank paid for the Greek operations of Cyprus’s two largest banks in March 2013. Piraeus, which a few months later reported a €3.5 billion profit, is now Greece’s largest domestic bank and a hedge fund darling.

Cyprus, on the other hand, still grapples with the fallout of the crisis. Its economy has contracted by 10 percent over the last two years and its jobless rate is 15.3 percent, up from 12 percent in 2012.

“We have made lots of mistakes and paid for them,” said Stavros A. Zenios, a professor of finance at the University of Cyprus who was hired by the government to investigate the crisis. “But the broader impact of these excessive assumptions used by Pimco has been huge.”

Pimco officials point out that the current level of nonperforming loans in Cyprus — about €22 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund — is more or less in line with what they estimated. They also insist that their conclusions were endorsed by the country’s creditors.

“We are proud of the work we did in Cyprus and stand firmly behind our findings,” Eric J. Mogelof, the Pimco executive who oversaw the project, said in a statement.

Panicos Demetriades, the governor of the Cyprus central bank at the time, remains critical of Pimco’s work, but rejects the claim that the forecasts were overstated. “The assumptions relating to the Pimco adverse scenario have unfortunately been surpassed,” he said in an interview.

As to why he did not tell the new government about the BlackRock study, he said that the issue was too technical for top officials to understand and that the report was not in its complete form when crisis negotiations began in March 2013.

The problems trace back to the parlous state of the Cypriot banking sector at the height of the European debt crisis in early 2012. Having taken in billions of euros from Russian oligarchs, the country’s two largest banks, Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank, piled into risky Greek bonds. When those bonds were restructured in early 2012, substantial losses followed.

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Facing re-election, the government blamed not just the banks, but also their regulator, Athanasios Orphanides. Mr. Demetriades, a finance professor with strong ties to the governing party, replaced him in May 2012.

In late June, Fitch Ratings reported the banks’ needs to be about €4 billion, a high figure, but not one to cause undue panic. A month later, that changed when Mr. Demetriades publicly suggested that the banks might require €12 billion to survive, citing a meeting with the I.M.F.

With unease mounting, Mr. Demetriades moved to get a true assessment of the damage and solicited bids from Pimco, BlackRock, Oliver Wyman and Clayton Euro Risk. BlackRock was widely seen as the favorite, according to officials involved in the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The firm had an established financial markets advisory group that operated as a distinct unit, helping central banks analyze the loan portfolios of their banking systems. At the time, BlackRock was in the midst of a broad review of the Greek banking sector.

Pimco had a smaller unit and had little experience dissecting banking systems in ailing eurozone economies.

With analysts already on the ground in Athens, BlackRock was also able to undercut Pimco on price. Led by its top executive, Craig S. Phillips, BlackRock offered to do the job for about €9 million, about half of Pimco’s winning bid, according to the minutes of the committee that judged the pitches.

Committee members said in the minutes that it was “unfortunate” Pimco’s bid was so much more expensive. But BlackRock had worked closely with the central bank in Greece analyzing the banking system, and the creditors of Cyprus wanted a fresh set of eyes, according to the people involved in the discussions.

After securing the mandate in October, Pimco analysts delved into the banks’ books, analyzing loan portfolios and calculating how high loan losses would be in 2015. According to one person involved in the deliberations, Cypriot central bank officials took the lead, emphasizing how important it was to be “very strict with the banks” in terms of economic and financial assumptions.

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The creditors of Cyprus raised few objections. After billions of euros in taxpayer-funded bailouts, Germany in particular, wanted the banks to pay their fair share.

In December 2012, word leaked that the banks could need as much as €10 billion. And executives at the largest bank, the Bank of Cyprus, complained vigorously to Mr. Demetriades.

Feeling the pressure from bankers and politicians, Mr. Demetriades took an unorthodox step. He hired the same BlackRock team that missed out on the initial job to review Pimco’s work for €545,000.

Pimco executives were outraged. They claimed that the action violated their contract and refused to give their rival access to their models on the basis that this was proprietary information, the central bank chief said.

“Pimco became very difficult — and we realized then that this was a very strong rivalry,” said Mr. Demetriades.

Provided with a redacted version of the Pimco review in January 2013, BlackRock was quick to highlight what it saw as deficiencies.

Pimco analysts, BlackRock wrote, gave little chance that troubled loans would recover over time and were very aggressive in marking down the value of real estate collateral. All of that increased the loan loss estimates and the amount of money needed to keep banks solvent. BlackRock also criticized Pimco’s lack of transparency.

When Pimco delivered its report on Feb. 1, Mr. Demetriades wrote an excoriating letter to Mr. Mogelof, the Pimco executive overseeing the project. Pimco’s estimate, the central bank chief wrote, “appears to be extracted from a black box calculation.” Mr. Mogelof responded in a letter that its assumptions came directly from Mr. Demetriades’s team at the central bank as well as the country’s creditors.

A month and a half later, the Pimco report would be used by European officials to calculate the bailout. The gloomy assessment was also used to defend the Piraeus Bank’s purchase of the Cyprus banks’ assets. According to people who participated in the review, Pimco bankers have said that they never intended the report to be used to value the Piraeus Bank transaction.

As for the BlackRock analysis, it was kept strictly under wraps. So much so, that in internal communications BlackRock bankers used code: Claire for the Cyprus central bank, Peter for Pimco and Ben for BlackRock.

In early March 2013, Mr. Demetriades wrote to the newly elected president, Nicos Anastasiades, saying he accepted the fact that the Pimco forecasts were on the extreme side. But, he said, even if Cyprus had picked BlackRock in the first place — and the result was a lower estimate for cash required by the banks — it would have mattered little since the country’s creditors were pushing for the highest possible figure.

In the letter, however, Mr. Demetriades never mentioned the BlackRock report and the questions it raised about Pimco’s findings.

“We did not know anything about any BlackRock report,” said Michael Sarris, the Cyprus finance minister who led the talks with Europe. “If there was anything that identified flaws in the Pimco report or indicated that we needed less money — then clearly this should have been brought to the table.”