AUGUSTA — The sale of the state’s largest student loan portfolio by a Maine nonprofit to a for-profit Nebraska corporation came under sharp attack by two Democratic senators at a legislative hearing Thursday.

“It’s striking some of us as taking the money and running,” said Sen. Susan Longley, D-Liberty.

Last week the Maine Educational Loan Marketing Corp., or MELMAC, announced that it was selling its $504 million in assets to the National Education Loan Network, or NELnet, which is based in Lincoln, Neb. The deal is scheduled to close in December.

In return, MELMAC is to receive $30 million, which it said it would use to create an educationally oriented foundation.

Longley described the foundation as “a sound-good” initiative, established by a “unilateral” decision of MELMAC’s board of directors in which neither lawmakers nor the governor had any say about whether the state needed such a foundation.

Sen. Carol Kontos, D-Windham, was outraged that lawmakers had no inkling about the sale. They should have been forewarned, she said, given two years of legislative inquiry into MELMAC and work on legislation that is set to take effect Aug. 11. The pending law gives the governor the authority to appoint four MELMAC board members to provide greater public oversight into the agency.

At the hearing Thursday, it was argued that MELMAC’s assets require public oversight and the sale public involvement because the assets were created through the tax-exemption of its nonprofit status and because it has access to tax-exempt bonds. The nontaxable bonds are used to raise money to lend to students and families.

MELMAC’s assets amount to $504 million. Ninety percent of the total is in student loans issued to roughly 60,000 borrowers, equal to about three-fifths of all student loans in Maine. All but $19 million of the $504 million was raised by issuing tax-exempt bonds.

MELMAC was established in 1983 as a secondary market for student loans, buying the loans issued by banks to ensure the availability of college financing in the state. NELnet is one of the three largest student lenders in the nation.

Attorney General Andrew Ketterer earlier this week filed suit to stop the sale, asking a Superior Court judge to review the transaction. At the hearing before the Committee on Business and Economic Development Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Linda Pistner restated the reasons the state is seeking an injunction.

The first reason is to make sure the sale complies with state law, Pistner said. The second is to give a judge the chance to determine whether the $30 million is an adequate value. And third to make sure there are no conflicts of interest in the sale.

Rebecca Goldberg, a Boston consultant to the Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, has watched similar conversions in other states.

At the hearing, she urged lawmakers to make sure the valuation was adequate by hiring an outside agency to assess MELMAC and by “most importantly” asking for the documentation behind the valuation.

Goldberg noted that in Massachusetts a similar conversion had produced a $325 million foundation from a $1.8 billion portfolio. Based on that sale, the MELMAC portfolio could possibly produce a foundation three times larger than the $30 million offered.

The sum, which is still subject to change between now and December, was determined by Salomon Smith Barney. After being asked by lawmakers, MELMAC’s lawyer, Jon Doyle, a former deputy attorney general, cited confidentiality agreements and the attorney general’s litigation in saying he was not at liberty to release the documentation concerning the valuation.

Doyle disputed the attorney general’s jurisdiction in the matter. He pointed out that while the student-loan agency had been established at the direction of then-Gov. Joseph Brennan in 1983, it was set up pursuant to federal student-lending statutes.

A 1996 federal law allows for the creation of the charitable foundation with the sale proceeds rather than sending the money back to the federal government, which could otherwise lay claim to the $30 million, he added.

“Some of [lawmakers’] quarrels are with Congress,” Doyle said.

But Kontos said, “Were it not for state action, MELMAC would not exist.”

Doyle and Richard Pierce, president of Maine Education Services, were grilled by lawmakers about any financial inducements involved in the sale. MES provides all student-loan administrative and management services for MELMAC.

Doyle said that no one is receiving any financial inducements from the sale. NELnet is looking at hiring some of the MES staff to manage the former-MELMAC portfolio, he added.

Pierce, a former Republican state senator from Waterville who incorporated MELMAC 17 years ago, asked rhetorically, “What did Dick Pierce walk away with? Zero. There was nothing in it for Dick Pierce.”

Kontos took Pierce to task for the partisan manner in which he cast the legislative deliberations of the past few years in the MES Chronicle, the agency’s quarterly publication.

“I have never seen anything like it and I hope I never will,” Kontos said.