The Forgotten Ponzi

This Week In Blunders – Jan. 26-31

“Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” — Aeschylus

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The best thing that you can do with a convicted swindler is lock him up – but don’t forget about him.

In 2009, Robert Allen Stanford was arrested for allegedly defrauding more than 30,000 investors in 113 countries. He stole more than $7 billion and he received a 110-year prison sentence after his 2012 conviction.

I’d written about his crimes several times, but I scantily remembered them until Thursday when a federal judge finally slapped Stanford with a $5.9 billion civil fine.

The judge also ordered Stanford Financial Group's former chief financial officer James Davis to pay $17.66 million and former chief accounting officer Gilberto Lopez to pay $3.42 million for their contributions to this massive global fraud.

What took the justice system so long? Who cares? None of this money is likely to be paid, especially with Stanford all brokey and in the pokey.

Who? Allen Stanford should be famous for the billions he stole. (Photo Credit: Mug shot, U.S. Marshalls Service.

Stanford convinced his mostly foreign investors that their money was safely deposited in CDs while he spent it with abandon, destroying lives wherever he went.

Stealing as many billions he did, he should have been recognized as a Ponzi scheme superstar, but as I wrote in 2009, he was upstaged by Bernie Madoff, who was initially alleged to have stolen as much as $65 billion.