Consider it a joke from the universe: It was Bernard Madoff’s financial meltdown that helped implicate R. Allen Stanford, the flamboyant Texas billionaire accused of defrauding investors of $8 billion.
Of course, the men share certain similarities one might expect from shrewd con men: Both cultivated wealthy investors. And both claimed “premium” returns that regulators say never existed.
But here the plot thickens: Employees of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission told the Associated Press that after the embarrassing revelations about how they had let Madoff through their sights despite multiple tips, they feared getting another black eye with Stanford.
And so the pace of their investigation into Stanford’s finances dramatically quickened.
Investigators felt they had the goods on him shortly after Madoff’s arrest, when Stanford put out a memo to investors that a team of 20-plus financial analysts for Stanford Financial Group had vetted all potential investments and that his bank had no “direct or indirect” exposure to Madoff’s scheme.
Those reassurances were false on both counts, the SEC noted.
“Contrary to this statement, at least $400,000 … was invested in Meridian, a New York-based hedge fund that used Tremont Partners as its asset manager. Tremont invested approximately 6-8% of the SIB assets they indirectly managed with Madoffs investment firm,” according to the complaint.
Moreover, the complaint says, the so-called “vetting team” was, in fact, just three people - Stanford, his former college roommate-turned-chief financial officer James M. Davis and his chief investment officer, Laura Pendergest-Holt - all of whom are charged civilly by the SEC.
But that’s just the beginning of the odd coincidences surrounding Stanford’s business dealings.
In a post this week, TPMMuckraker called the Stanford saga “a kind of harmonic convergence of recent high-profile muck,” and we have to agree.
Besides the connection to Madoff, Stanford has a series of ties, most of them indirect, to former Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich and even to associates of jailed Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
For starters, John R. Wyma was a paid lobbyist for Stanford in 2002, helping him oppose proposed regulation of financial services companies.
Wyma, an influential lobbyist and fund-raiser, was once a confidante and close friend to Blagojevich - that is, before last October, when he agreed to cooperate with U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the former governor in hopes of gaining immunity from prosecution himself.
At the time of Blagojevich’s arrest, The Chicago Tribune reported that Wyma had been one of Blagojevich’s most trusted allies: “The governor routinely reported exchanging personal gifts and often appeared at Wyma-sponsored fundraisers where Wyma’s clients hobnobbed with the governor before turning over checks for his campaign fund.”
The link to Abramoff is more circuitous: Some of the congressmen who were close to Abramoff appear on the list of those who took trips to Antigua and Barbuda funded in part by Stanford through the Inter-American Economic Council, a business-funded group with the aim of promoting “dialogue about current and future economic strategies in the Hemisphere.”
Stanford was described in several media reports as a principal backer of the Washington-based group, who used the trips as opportunities to personally talk to lawmakers about “the need to streamline regulatory regimes that make it difficult for investors to take advantage of all of the opportunities that exist in the region.”
Among the lawmakers who took those junkets were Bob Ney, the former Ohio Republican who went to jail after admitting trading favors for gifts from Abramoff and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who received generous contributions from several Indian tribes represented by Abramoff.
In 2006, Stanford received the organization’s “Excellence in Leadership” Award, according to TPMMuckraker. A press release put out by the group declared that Stanford “has strongly supported the work that the IAEC is doing in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
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