Looks like the SEC actually moved on this one.

[randomness]

The financial blogs have been buzzing about R. Allen Stanford and his Stanford International Bank for some time now. Today, the U. S. Marshals raided his Houston offices. The SEC filed "to halt a massive, ongoing fraud orchestrated by R. Allen Stanford and James Davis and executed through companies they control".

Backstory at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/business/18stanford.html, which says:

[T]he Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday accused Robert Allen Stanford, the chief of the Stanford Financial Group, of fraud in the sale of about $8 billion of high-yielding certificates of deposit held in the firm’s bank in Antigua.

Shortly after 10 a.m. Central time, about 40 police officers and other law enforcement officials simultaneously entered Stanford Group’s two office buildings in Houston.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/02/17/52576/the-full-sec-complaint-against-stanford/ has a series of blog posts on the group.

The SEC complaint filed against R. Allen Stanford and his companies is at http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2009/comp20901.pdf?bcsi_scan_447638299E31E942=Dp61twMoOKBnAMQdCH19eAoAAACtCX0M&bcsi_scan_filename=comp20901.pdf

After Bernie Madoff, I think the SEC simply had to be seen to do something. (The Times article touches on that as well.)

Comments

[muffyjo]

Ok, help me out here, I'm not getting my brain wrapped around this somehow. The CEO and CFO of this company managed to somehow invest in things both in the US and in Antigua and somehow $8 Billion were lost and untraceable? In the midst of that :

They said they had liquid funds when they didn't.

They quoted a rate of 5.375 percent on a $100,000 three-year C.D., compared with rates of less than 3.2 percent at American banks.

They said they were not hit by the Ponzi scheme but actually were because they invested in the folks investing in those funds (feeder funds).

They seem to have artificially inflate the ROI history of a fund they were managing

Oh, and they failed to register that they were an investment company. Oops?

So it's not only misplaced money but it's failed on multiple fronts at the same time? Wow.

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

Well, the current best guess is that this company was itself a Ponzi scheme, so all of the different problems are really parts of that same problem.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

BTW, if you don't follow solarbird, you might want to consider it. She has oodles of interesting financial tidbits on a daily basis.