Stanford whistleblowers had concerns since 2005

Reuters ^ | Feb 20, 2009 | Chris Baltimore

[Lorianne]

For Mark Tidwell and Charles Rawl, former employees who filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Texas billionaire Allen Stanford's financial empire, the alarm bells first rang in May 2005, when some clients got a letter from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tidwell and Rawl's concerns that Stanford was falsifying the returns of about $8 billion in certificates of deposit were eventually heeded by the SEC, which on Tuesday accused Stanford in a civil complaint of "massive ongoing fraud."

But at the time, the SEC inquiry came out of the blue, Tidwell and Rawl told Reuters in an interview at a law office in Houston on Thursday.

Clients "just got this FedEx package from the SEC," said Tidwell, 40, who was a Stanford senior vice president before he left the company in 2007, along with Rawl.

"We asked what it was about and they assured us that it was just a routine inquiry, it was not any big deal, do not be alarmed," Tidwell said.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2006, when Tidwell said he was given instructions to clean up the files on Stanford's international bank clients and remove any non-official documentation and "any sticky notes."

A few weeks later, Tidwell learned that the SEC was still investigating Stanford, even though he was given assurances that they were not.

To make matters worse clients began calling to inquire about discrepancies between the published performance statistics of Stanford investments and the ones that showed up on clients' statements.