Posted on 02/28/2009 7:08:35 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
US case tells tale of Stanford exec's legal woes
By Chris Baltimore
Fri Feb 27, 4:03 pm ET
HOUSTON (Reuters) – Laura Pendergest-Holt, who spent Thursday night in a Houston detention center, can trace her legal ills to a private aircraft hangar in Miami.
That's where the Stanford Financial Group's 35-year-old chief investment officer huddled with other executives and lawyers on January 22 to hammer out a strategy for dealing with federal investigators.
They were probing what they would later call a massive scheme to defraud holders of $8 billion worth of certificates of deposit in an Antigua-based bank.
In the Miami hangar, one of many owned by Texas billionaire Allen Stanford, executives decided that Pendergest-Holt would be the one to face down U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators who had subpoenaed three executives to appear.
That's according to the criminal complaint filed in a Texas court against Pendergest-Holt. It reads in many ways like a page-turner by John Grisham, the legal thriller writer.
Five FBI agents arrested Pendergest-Holt on Thursday at the Houston office of Stanford Financial Group and charged her with criminal obstruction in the SEC investigation.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ping!
How could she and any other financial hotshot be so dumb as to work for such an outfit. Is this meeting and presentation with its bizarre three tiers of assets and 1.6 “loan” to the boss supposedly the magical moment when all these wizards realized the company’s portfolio was all smoke and mirrors?
Stanford was buds with Bill Clinton.
“The Baldwyn native, now 35, “had no financial services or securities industry experience” before joining SFG in 1997, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Yet less than a decade later she was managing more than $15 billion in assets and running a worldwide team of equity, policy and sector analysts, Pendergest-Holt told the Memphis Business Journal in 2006.
Her rise to the top might seem improbable, but Pendergest-Holt had a killer combination of beauty, brains and connections. She knew key players in the Stanford firms, was an expert number-cruncher and has been described as strikingly beautiful and statuesque.
“Laura Pendergest may have had no financial experience, but she is also not unattractive,” remarked one commentator at Business Week’s online forum.”
I would bet it was at an airport subsided by the tax payers.
FYI..interesting tidbit..last night I attended a charity premier in Tampa of “Running The Sahara” a documentary about three ultramarathoners who run across Africa..from Senegal to the Red Sea. Amazing film. Worth seeing. One of the producers was hosting the event..and while the opening credits were on screen, it listed one of the major financers as “The Stanford Group” He had the film stopped and told the audience..”Yup..see that name..that’s the same guy. Who knew?”
Gracious! I stand corrected.
I would have compared her to Tom Cruise’s fictional hot-shot law graduate who is unwittingly recruited by a mob front in “The Firm” but at least that character had the degrees.
Of course, Stanford and his inner circle would cultivate and promote some kid of reasonable intelligence and overweening ego and let her think she was rising on her merits while all the while she was being used as the perfect front-office dupe.
A fully trained and qualified finance expert would presumably have checked the bottom line and known what to look out for before being recruited. And called up the SEC if they found shennanigans going on under their purview.
True, who is the king of the ponzi???
Nice work.
Both parties are well represented!
>>True, who is the king of the ponzi???
FDR?
After all, he got the ball rolling on Social Security. It would be pretty hard to beat that. And it’s “legal”!
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