It seems like a nightmare for some 28,000 investors who were allegedly bilked of some $7 billion by financier R. Allen Stanford: two receivers, one in the United States and the other in Antigua, are fighting over what to do with Stanford’s assets.
Dallas attorney Ralph Janvey, who was appointed as Stanford’s U.S. receiver, has just asked the Department of Justice to seize some $330 million frozen in Stanford’s foreign bank accounts, Bloomberg reports. Janvey has been battling a receiver appointed by the Antiguan government for control of the financier’s estate for nearly three years.
“The Antiguan receiver was awarded control by Swiss and British courts of the former billionaire’s bank accounts in those countries, while Janvey controls Stanford assets in the U.S.,” Bloomberg explains. “Lawyers for Janvey and the Antiguan receiver told the Dallas judge in charge of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s civil fraud case against Stanford that the two receivers can’t agree how to share control of the estate or repay depositors.”
“Millions of dollars have been spent litigating these jurisdictional issues – all at the expense of the victims,” attorney Peter Morgenstern, a member of the Stanford investors’ committee, said in a Nov. 18 letter to the DOJ, Bloomberg said. “The committee urges the DOJ to immediately begin the process to repatriate these funds to the U.S. for prompt distribution to all legitimate Stanford victims, regardless of citizenship or residency status.”
Meanwhile, Stanford has been busy while in prison awaiting trial. For a time, he was suing the DOJ, the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission, accusing the agencies of “abusive law enforcement,” as Main Justice reported last March.
