Great frauds in history: Stanford’s great bank-bond heist

published 13 February 2019

Robert Allen Stanford was born in Texas in 1950 and made a living running a gym before that failed and he turned to speculating in real estate in Houston in the 1980s. He made his fortune, then moved to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, setting up the Guardian International Bank, then moving it to the nearby island of Antigua and renaming it Stanford International Bank (SIB) to avoid a regulatory crackdown. He also set up a wealth-management firm, which encouraged clients to invest their money in certificates of deposits (CDs, redeemable bonds used by banks) issued by Stanford International Bank. These offered a higher interest rate than CDs offered by US banks, but were supposedly backed by insured assets.

Instead of being invested in a wide range of assets, as promised, much of the money received by SIB was loaned out to Stanford and his companies and property schemes, which consistently lost money. As a result, SIB was forced to keep issuing new CDs in order to repay its existing creditors (in other words, it was much like a Ponzi scheme). To disguise the bank's true financial position, Stanford misreported the bank's assets and even forged an insurance certificate.

Thanks to aggressive marketing, Stanford managed to sell $7.2bn worth of CDs. Stanford's fraud imploded when the financial crisis led investors to seek to redeem their bonds. The crisis made it impossible for Stanford to sell any of his private firms to raise money. In a final roll of the dice he promised to inject $741m into SIB, but much of this came in the form of land originally bought for $64m a few months earlier. By February 2009 the FBI had raided Stanford's offices, and he was sentenced to 110 years in prison in 2012.

Subscribe to MoneyWeek

Subscribe to MoneyWeek today and get your first six magazine issues absolutely FREE

Get 6 issues free

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/mw70aro6gl1676370748.jpg

Sign up to Money Morning

Don't miss the latest investment and personal finances news, market analysis, plus money-saving tips with our free twice-daily newsletter

American CDs are normally protected by depositor insurance schemes, but Antigua doesn't offer similar protection. As of October 2017, receivers had managed to get back only $350m of $7bn for CD holders, roughly 5%. The scandal shows it is a bad idea to invest money in offshore banks where protection for investors is minimal and regulation inadequate. Indeed, for a time, Stanford was the chairman of Antigua's financial regulator.

Explore More

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri