NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fabrice Tourre, a central figure in a controversial Goldman Sachs Group Inc. transaction, asked a judge to throw out a US regulator's fraud lawsuit against him, two-and-a-half months after the bank settled its part of the case for $550 million.

Citing a recent US Supreme Court ruling, Mr. Tourre said the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) case must be dismissed because the 2007 "Abacus" transaction, which involved collateralized debt obligations tied to sub-prime mortgages, took place outside the US.

The Supreme Court, in the case Morrison v National Australia Bank Ltd., ruled in June that Australian shareholders who bought that bank's stock outside the US could not raise securities fraud claims in US courts. Several judges have since applied the ruling to bar US lawsuits in other scenarios, including where the plaintiffs are not foreign investors.

The SEC lawsuit accused Goldman and Mr. Tourre, a vice-president, of misleading investors about Abacus by failing to reveal that the hedge fund Paulson & Co helped choose the underlying securities and bet against them.

In a filing late on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, Mr. Tourre said Abacus did not involve a purchase or sale in the US or a security listed on a US exchange, as required under Morrison's "transactional test".

Citing 10 million pages of documents the SEC turned over in August and September, he said the CDOs were not listed on any exchange, and their sole investor was Germany's IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG, which invested overseas.

SEC spokesman John Nester declined to discuss the filing.