Staff at troubled telecoms firms Qwest Communications and Global Crossing were driven by pressure from Wall Street to book "spurious" deals, an inquiry has heard.

Current and former staff at the fallen telecoms giants have told Congress that a desire to underpin share prices prompted them to sign unnecessary network capacity deals.

Patrick Joggerst, a former Global Crossing sales executive, said that many deals were done merely to "meet revenue numbers for the quarter".

Mr Joggerst told the US House Energy and Commerce sub-committee of investigations that Global Crossing chiefs had said to was "not acceptable" to miss a $3bn revenue target.

Subcommittee chairman James Greenwood said: "Confronted with shrinking markets and declining business volume, executives at Global Crossing and Qwest used capacity swaps to conceal slowing growth by booking fictitious revenues."

Both firms are under investigation by US finance watchdog the SEC and the US Justice Department over their accounting practices.

Qwest on Sunday admitted it had improperly accounted for $950m in capacity sales and costs.

Global Crossing is in bankruptcy.

Andersen named

Robin Szelgia, Qwest's former chief financial officer, told the hearing of a "heightened sense of pressure for everyone in the company".

Ms Szelgia, now in charge of property and procurement at the firm, claimed in 2000 to have confronted Qwest chiefs over a deal, and said that controversial capacity swaps were done under the guidance of disgraced auditor Andersen.

Andersen's US operation has since folded after it was convicted of blocking a federal probe into the collapse of Enron.

Qwest has yet to say if it will join the growing list of litigants seeking to sue the remnants of the audit firm.

Congressman Billy Tauzin, chairman of the full Energy and Commerce committee, said telecoms company staff had done dubious side deals without the knowledge of auditors or senior corporate officials.

"We found side agreements ... that if known to the accountants would have led them to believe there was misaccounting going on," Mr Tauzin said.