Well lookie lookie - I knew this was not for real

[malaise]

For well over a year I've been asking DUers for more information on Allen Stanford (the Texan who was involved with West Indies cricket and who financed the million dollar tournament with the English cricket team). Shortly after the Venezuelans started investigating his bank, he fired persons involved in the tournament and word is that's the end of that, but look what showed up in Salon.com.
Do we have another ponzi here?

http://blogs.salon.com/0001330/
<snip>
Since the Madoff affair, there have been quite a number of smaller cases discovered and in Venezuela it gave rise to fairly entertaining blog in Spanish called Venepiramides, which has been covering this subject in detail.

Then last week, Veneconomia, in its monthly issue (Which I collaborate with), carried an article called Duck Tales, (in Spanish here) written by our friend and sometimes reader Alex Dalmady in which Alex analyzes Stanford International Bank (SIB), an Antigua'based financial institution with some US$ 8 billion in deposits mostly from Latin America and an estimated US$ 3 billion from Venezuelans. Another blog in English, Caracas Gringo, has already reviewed most of Alex’ findings.

What Alex does in a very entertaining style, is to ask what you should ask yourself if you are trying to find a “Financial Duck”, that is, a financial institution which like Madoff, it’s too good to be true, nobody can match what it does, like the Madoff pyramid it is run by a very small group of people and with no single institution having the incentives to uncover the fraud.

After analyzing SIB, Dalmady concludes that SIB has feathers, quacks, waddles and has webbed feet. That is, all of the tests that Dalmady could come up with, point to SIB looking a lot like a financial duck and people should be more careful of not placing their money with something that looks like a duck.

From the link
http://caracasgringo.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/stanford-international-bank-antiguas-bernie-madoff/
<snip>
US-based financial analyst Alex Dalmady ([email protected]) recently analyzed for Caracas-based VenEconomy Monthly the Antigua-based Stanford International Bank, which is owned by Texas billionaire Sir (knighted by Antigua, not the Queen) Allen Stanford (net worth $2.2 billion, according to Forbes).

VenEconomy Monthly has been breaking major economic and financial stories about Venezuela for nearly 25 years, and Dalmady has long been recognized as one of Venezuela’s and South Florida’s most respected and authoritative financial analysts.

Without saying so directly, Dalmady concludes that SIB, which reportedly is owned by the same Stanford Group which operates a commercial bank in Venezuela, could be a financial house of cards - the offshore investment banking equivalent of a balsa wood house on stilts in Hurricane Alley.
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gr.