Today was a surreal day in the surreal case of accused (though not yet criminally-charged) Texas ponzi schemer Allen Stanford, even by the standards of Stanford. First came a credulity-straining BBC report that Stanford somehow bought himself 10 years of amnesty from SEC scrutiny by serving as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Then Fox Business News piped in, excerpting a strange paragraph from a letter it had received as part of a Freedom of Information Act request from someone claiming that two of Stanford’s clients were part of the Venezuelan mafia. CNBC replayed the segment of its interview with Stanford in which reporter Scott Cohn asks if the disgraced financier had ever assisted “federal authorities” — to which Stanford blurts out “You mean the CIA?” before declining to comment further. (It’s embedded after the jump.)
But not everyone in the Stanford family cooperates, and tomorrow we may finally get some clarity on this bizarre scam in the form of a “global indictment,” if reports from Fox Business News are accurate. Stanford himself still isn’t getting charged, though; the feds are coming down again on his glamorous chief investment officer Laura Pendergest-Holt, who was already arrested and charged with obstruction of justice in the scheme — and last week denied every allegation against her. The Fox clip, also after the jump.
Laura Pendergest-Holt is the executive accused of misinforming SEC officials investigating Stanford earlier this year, and in some ways she has been as inscrutable as Stanford himself. From a new Texas Monthly feature the Stanford scheme:
It’s hard to believe in retrospect, but working at Stanford meant answering to three people whose combined financial expertise probably wouldn’t have landed them a job at any Wall Street firm. Before joining Stanford Financial Group, in 1997, Laura Pendergest-Holt’s previous experience included the limited trajectory from Baldwyn High School, where she was student council treasurer, to Mississippi University for Women, where she was a math major, to Mississippi State, where she earned a master’s of science. By the time she was 31, perhaps owing to her closeness with her “visionary mentor,” Jim Davis, who had met her at the First Baptist Church in Baldwyn, she was Stanford Financial’s chief investment officer, overseeing its billion-dollar portfolio. Tall and willowy, with tawny-brown hair and a Southern girl’s radiant smile, she was good at pumping up the troops when she gave her financial reports. She was plenty smart and a very hard worker, so maybe she deserved the $700 bottle of wine that she was seen to order at a charity event, the designer clothes, the trips on a Stanford jet from Baldwyn to the Stanford office in Memphis, a distance of 91 miles. Maybe the temper tantrums were justified when her expenses were questioned. Maybe she was simply a woman of her time, which was excessive, after all.
Here’s the CNBC segment from this morning:
