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San Juan, Puerto Rico - The Caribbean offshore bank at the center of an alleged Ponzi scheme by a wealthy Texas businessman has a $6bn shortfall between assets and liabilities, a court-appointed liquidator reported Friday, confirming fears that investors will likely get little of their money back.
Stanford International Bank in Antigua, run by financier R. Allen Stanford, owed about $7.2bn, including interest, when regulators closed it in February after the US Securities and Exchange Commission alleged it was offering fraudulent certificates of deposit, the liquidators said in a letter to investors.
But the liquidators said they have found less than $1bn in assets, including just $46m in cash at accounts in Antigua, Canada, the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
The cause of the "very significant shortfall" is unknown at this time but the records "indicate that a Ponzi scheme ... had been in operation," the liquidators, Nigel Hamilton-Smith and Peter Wastell of Vantis Business Recovery Services, said in the report.
The SEC has accused Stanford and his top executives of conducting a massive fraud in which they claimed to offer certificates of deposit through the Antigua bank, touting them as a conservative investment.
Money poured in from around the world, with nearly 28 000 depositors from 113 countries investing in the CDs, according to the Vantis report.
SIB apparently had about $472m invested in stocks, bonds and other securities at various financial institutions and another $470m lent to corporations as equity investments. But the actual value of both is likely to be "significantly" less than reported in bank records, the liquidators said in their report.
Depositor Michael Kogutt, a business executive who lives near Dallas, Texas, said earlier that investors heard they might get back only about 5 cents of every dollar they had turned over to Stanford.
The new Vantis report said it is still too early to provide a specific figure.
"It is however clear that the assets of SIB are likely to be significantly less than the amounts owing to depositors and other creditors," it said.
- AP