STANFORD
By Dennis Seid
Daily Journal
NEW ORLEANS – Disgraced former Stanford Financial chairman and CEO R. Allen Stanford must serve his 110-year sentence for defrauding thousands in his $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans last week rejected Allen’s 299-page appeal of his 2012 fraud conviction and 110-year sentence.
More than 23,000 investors worldwide lost their life savings and retirement funds through Stanford’s fraud, including thousands of Mississippians.
Stanford victims were promised high returns after investing in the CDs through the former Stanford Financial Group, but it was a classic Ponzi scheme in which investors were paid from money put in by earlier investors. The scheme came crashing down in February 2009 when federal officials raided Stanford offices across the country, including an office in Tupelo.
Stanford was convicted in March 2012 of 13 counts of fraud and sentenced to 110 years of prison in 2012. SFG’s former chief financial officer, James Davis, and its chief investment officer, Laura Pendergest-Holt, were from Baldwyn and had offices in Tupelo and Memphis.
Davis was sentenced in early 2013 to five years in federal prison, his sentence lighter after cooperating with federal prosecutors. Pendergest-Holt was sentenced to three years in federal prison in September 2012.
Stanford, 65, is serving his sentence in a central Florida high-security facility.
The 5th Circuit Court rejected Stanford’s claims that his indictment was defective, that the jury received faulty instructions during his seven-week trial, that the government withheld evidence favorable to him, that the trial judge favored the government and that his sentence was improper.
“The court’s sentence of 110 years fell within the 230-year sentence authorized by the sentencing guidelines and is therefore presumed reasonable,” Circuit Judge Edith Brown Clement wrote Thursday for the court.
Stanford filed his appeal on his own behalf, without an attorney. He was represented by more than 18 attorneys from the time he was arrested in 2009 and his sentencing in 2013, when he filed a four-page motion asking to take over his own appeal. He filed a 299-page appeal last October.
Less than $200 million has been returned to investors, and several hundred million dollars is tied up in litigation.
dennis.seid@journalinc.com
Twitter: @dennisseid