FOX Business reported yesterday that Stanford Financial may have had dealings with people tied to organized crime. That information is based on documents FOX obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. FOX noted:
The BBC had previously reported that Sir Allen Stanford, Stanford Financial’s founder, supplied the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration secret information about money laundering by clients in Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and Ecuador, allegedly buying himself protection from U.S. investigators who were looking in to his financial empire. Did the U.S. government delay action against Stanford, sacrificing thousands of investors, so the DEA could obtain more information about drug cartels laundering money?
Read the rest of the story here.
Last week FOX also reported that depositors and investors in Stanford were on to the alleged fraud as early as 2002, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents obtained by FOX Business Network. Further into that story, FOX noted yet another development in 2003:
A bigger red flag was waved by a whistleblower on Sept. 1, 2003. A person describing himself as an “insider who does not wish to remain silent, but also fears for his own personal safety and that of his family” wrote in a letter that “Stanford Financial is the subject of a lingering corporate fraud scandal perpetuated as a massive Ponzi scheme that will destroy the life savings of many, damage the reputation of all associated parties, ridicule securities and banking authorities, and shame the United States of America.”
The letter said that “by association with Wall Street giant Bear Stearns,” it is marketing the CDs as safe, but “investor proceeds are being directed into speculative investments like stocks, options, futures, currencies, real estate and unsecured loans.”
Read the story here and letter here.
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http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5780606.ece
By the late 1990s the country had a reputation for dodgy offshore banking and American authorities discovered that $3m deposited in Stanfordââ?¬â?¢s bank had come from Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a Mexican drug runner known as ââ?¬Å?the lord of the heavensââ?¬Â for transporting drugs by air.
Fuentes died while having extensive plastic surgery that went wrong; the bodies of the surgeons were later found cemented into oil drums