Missing Stanford and His Destructive Path

Allen Stanford is missing.

The Texas-born banker, formerly No. 205 in Forbes's list of 400 Richest Americans, managed to scam hundreds of investors while keeping a very high profile. The resident of St. Croix and holder of dual US-Antigua citizenships supported cricket, golf and tennis tournaments and even managed to get knighted by the government of Antigua while reportedly being investigated for fifteen years by American authorities. In spite of those investigations, it wasn't until yesterday that a US District judge signed a temporary restraining order in Dallas federal court freezing the Stanford companies’ assets and property.

Bloomberg reports,

Stanford said on his company’s Web site that his firm was started more than 70 years ago by his grandfather. U.S. court records show that his offshore bank was formed in 1985 on the Caribbean island of Montserrat and moved to Antigua in 1990.

In 1999, Stanford Financial tried to take over Antiguan International Business Corp., which regulated offshore companies on the island, said Jonathan Winer, then a deputy U.S. assistant secretary of state.

State Department cables sent from the U.S. Embassy and provided to Bloomberg described a “power grab” and criticized the Stanford’s company’s hiring of U.S. consultants to revise Antigua’s offshore-banking rules.