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What sentence should a Ponzi get
Federal prosecutors are sort of boxing themselves in when it comes to sentencing requests for big Ponzimeisters.
Bernie Madoff, the king of Ponzis, got 150 years. And now federal prosecutors in NY are seeking an almost equally as punitive 145-year sentence for Marc Dreier, the mastermind of a much, much smaller Ponzi that fleeced some hedge funds out of some $400 million.
Dealbreaker’s Bess Levin surmises that Dreier, who was arrested in December a few days before Madoff, must be disappointed because he’s once again been upstaged by Bernie.
OK, I can understand the 150-year sentence for Madoff. Sure, it was overkill but it was intended to send a message as much as anything else. But Dreier is a mere Ponzi piker compared to Bernie.
Stanford gets Madoffed
It appears the punishing 150-year sentence meted out by a federal judge to Ponzi king Bernie Madoff is already having legal reprecussions.
A day after Madoff was sentenced to spend the rest of his life and then some in a federal prison, another federal judge in Texas sided with prosecutors in ordering R. Allen Stanford to remain in jail pending a trial on his own Ponzi-related charges. Now there’s no definitive connection between the Madoff sentencing and the ruling in the Stanford case, but it’s hard not to see some cause-and-effect.
Investors go mad
The global financial meltdown apparently has prompted some German investors to take justice into their own hands.
If the press reports are true, it appears a group of investors allegedly kidnapped and tortured a financial advisor who lost them a boatload of money. Now revenege is never the way to go, especially when there are authorities to take care of this sort of thing.
Alex on Stanford
Alex Dalmady, the man who got the ball rolling on R. Allen Stanford, has the last word of the day on the alleged $7 billion scamster.
Stanford: a little help from his friends
You can officially called R. Allen Stanford the alleged criminal mastermind of a giant multi-year Ponzi scheme.
Stanford’s name, of course, is all over the 21-count indictment. But the big shocker in the investigation into the $7 billion fraud involving those bogus certificates of deposit is an allegation that a top regulator in Antigua–where Stanford’s offshore bank was based–was on the take.
Allen Stanford lost at sea?
The R. Allen Stanford legal defense story keeps getting stranger and stranger.
While the securities world waits for the inevitable indictment of the Texas financier, he keeps going through lawyers with the same speed the alleged Ponzi mastermind was said to date women. Last week Stanford replaced his civil litigation defense team with a group of lawyers from the little-known Washington, D.C.-based law firm The Gulf Law Group.
The Gulf firm bills itself as a “full-service firm,” but it mainly appears to be a law firm specializing in admiralty and maritime law. On the firm’s homepage there are photographs of a lighthouse, a cargo ship and offshore drilling platform.
Allen Stanford’s many lives
The clock is still ticking on what would appear to be an inevitable indictment for disgraced Texas financier R. Allen Stanford, the man who allegedly ran an $8 billion Ponzi scheme out of his Antigua-based bank. It appears the federal prosecutors manning the investigation are trying to make sure they have an airtight case before filing criminal charges–something Stanford and his lawyer expect will happen any day.
At first blush, it’s hard to fathom why it should take this long for prosecutors to file charges, given that Stanford and two of his top associates were the subject of a civil action by the Securities and Exchange Commission nearly three months ago. One of those associates, Laura Pendergest-Holt, has even been indicted on federal obstruction of justice charges. But still nothing on Stanford.
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The Wall
