Stanford: Failed drug figher, too?

Some weeks ago, cricketwithballs insinuated that Allen Stanford may, in fact, be a CIA undercover operative. As it turns out, this may not be far from the truth.

Since his empire of meaningless paper came to a crashing demise in, only three, including Laura Pendergest-Holt, chief investment officer of Stanford Financial Group, have indicted.

This is a bit odd.

Stranger have happened, of course. For instance, Paul Collingwood’s continued inclusion into the England team can be attributed to his ownership of a laminator, which he lends to backroom staff for their “Please leave the toilets as you would expect to find them” posters, pinned up in away grounds loos.

Indeed, strange things do happen. John Sweeny, of the BBC’s investigative flagship programme Panorama has accused Twatford of being in the pocket of the US Drug Enforcement Administration as a registered informant from 1990. (You can watch the entire report here.)

He's currently under the protection of the American legal authorities, who were presumably happy for him to steal $8 billion of other people's money in return with the valuable information that brought about the complete cessation all trade in drugs.

This seems a little tenuous to me, and very little evidence supports this claim.

Most interesting is the ECB’s continued claims that it conducted adequate due diligence. Although, it states that all is fine because:

“ECB is not a financial regulatory body. No regulatory body expressed any concerns about Stanford when we announced the contract in June 2008.”

Bless. Horrid money confuses them.

But there is another admission:

“ECB conducted due diligence on the original deal.”

Notice “the deal” and not the man. Hitherto, the ECB has laughable claimed that it had been professional and thorough in its background checks. But now says that it only looked into the project, not the man. (See full statement here.)

The man who was bankrupt; lost his banking licence in Montserrat; was wanted by the Floridian authorities for multi-million dollar tax non-payment; and openly on the SEC “He’s a bit dodgy” list.

For some reason, the Australians, Indians, South Africans and the money fetishist ICC didn’t want anything to do with this snake-oiled cheat. And yet the ECB has been untouched by their involvement with the Black Hole of Antigua.

They haven’t even had the foresight to make the illegal immigrant cleaner into a scapegoat. Everything about this shocks me.

Anyway, John Sweeny: kudos.