Quote of the Day - Stanford trial edition

Alex Dalmady, who blew the whistle on Texan fraudster Allen Stanford:

"He had Forbes saying he had two billion dollars, when he had basically minus seven billion dollars; he was probably the poorest man on the planet."

Yet another naked emperor...

Once more, with a horrible inevitability, the financial world is reeling from the shock as investors discover they have been, for want of a better word, had. If it was all a con, this was one on the grand scale. Forget Madoff's country club golf amateurs; Stanford had the real deal on the payroll (and the polo players, the footballers and the pop stars).

Not for him a hired limo and a briefcase full of plain paper hidden under real money; Stanford settled for nothing less than a flashy helicopter and a vast perspex crate with more notes on view than most of us see in a lifetime. With 20/20 hindsight (no pun intended), what we were seeing could have been a supersize version of BBC 1's 'Hustle'.

It's all about credibility, about establishing a brand; Sir Allen Stanford used sport (and sportsmen) to make himself - and by extension his companies - a household name. It's an old game but it works every time; as Paul Newman tells Robert Redford in 'the Sting',

"You can't do it alone, ya know. It takes a mob of guys like you and enough money to make 'em look good."

Trouble is, that's standard business practice these days - everyone's at it. Straight or crook, there's no way to tell until the heads start to roll. We've had our collective fingers burned twice already; who knows how many more business empires may yet end up on the Emperor's catwalk?

Stanford Given the Finger

Is Robert Allen Stanford the new Bernard Madoff? As the dust settles on the Madoff case and Treasury officials hold him upside-down to make him "disgorge his ill-gotten gains"(as the indictment so picturesquely put it), another scandal is emerging in the allegedly dodgy dealings of Stanford’s various eponymous banks and companies. The press release from the US Securities and Exchange Commission states that he has been charged with orchestrating a fraudulent multi-billion dollar investment scheme.

Stanford is, of course, the gallant gentleman who, in the apparent absence of sufficient chairs, kindly allowed the wives and girlfriends of the English cricket team to sit on his knee. His companies, employing his family and friends in senior positions, solicited investment by offering unfeasibly large interest rates.... hold on, haven’t we heard all this somewhere before?

Yet again, the well heeled and supposedly finance-savvy (remember Nicola Horlick on Madoff?) have succumbed to the blandishments of the jet-set conmen and let greed triumph over common sense. Who in their right mind could believe in consistent double-figure annual returns for over 15 years? Yet SIB allegedly sold $8billion in ‘certificates of deposit’ through a network of financial advisors.

To quote Rose Romero, regional Director of the SEC’s Regional Office, “We are alleging a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world."

Sir Allen, it's just not cricket.