Appellate court keeps Stanford behind bars

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Fallen billionaire R. Allen Stanford will have to remain in jail until his trial, a federal appellate court ruled today.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Senior U.S. District Judge David Hittner did not abuse his discretion when he refused to let Stanford go free on bail.

White collar criminal defendants are frequently released before trial. But Hittner said Stanford is a flight risk because he has dual citizenship in the U.S. and the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, has traveled the world and could have access to financial resources.


“Stanford has the means, the motive, and the money to flee,” a three-judge panel of the appellate court wrote. The panel noted that Stanford “faces a potential sentence of 375 years in prison, has access to an international network of contacts, has previously concealed his travels” and has limited ties to Houston.

Stanford is a native Texan whose Stanford Financial Group was headquartered in Houston, but he mostly has lived elsewhere in recent years.

Stanford is being held in the Joe Corley Detention Facility in Conroe, where most federal pre-trial detainees stay.

He’s expected to appear in court Thursday for a hearing to discuss who is representing him.

Hittner has kept Houston criminal defense lawyer Dick DeGuerin on this case though DeGuerin asked to withdraw and Stanford has asked to be represented by Christina Sarchio and Robert Luskin of the Washington, D.C. firm Patton Boggs.

But Sarchio and Luskin won’t enter the case until they know they will be paid.

Stanford, 59, faces 21 counts of conspiracy, fraud, bribery and obstruction of justice. He and codefendants are accused of bilking investors in a $7 billion fraud involving certificates of deposit issued by an Antiguan bank that was part of Stanford Financial Group.

Because of a civil lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the assets of Stanford’s companies and his own private assets have been frozen. An insurance policy has not yet paid anything to lawyers in the case.

Just as Luskin and Sarchio’s firm, Patton Boggs, has asked for guarantees it will be paid if it represents Stanford, lawyers already in a related case who haven’t been paid are trying to find ways to get their fees.

Today lawyers for Stanford’s former chief investment officer, Laura Pendergest-Holt, asked Hittner to either stop criminal proceedings against her or order an insurance company to pay the lawyers.

Dan Cogdell and James Ardoin asked the judge to exercise his power and make Lloyd’s of London pay Pendergest-Holt’s lawyers as it once promised to do. They say they’ve already worked for six months on the complex case without pay, reviewing more than 250,000 documents and incurring $60,000 in copying costs alone. Pendergest-Holt’s personal assets were also frozen.

“Lloyd’s conduct directly affects the quality and integrity of the proceedings before this court as well as Mrs. Holt’s constitutional rights,” they say, since she could lose the right to counsel of her choice and wind up with court-appointed counsel.

A similar motion was filed Monday by another Stanford defendant, Gilbert Lopez, though his personal assets were not frozen in the SEC case.

Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/6585254.html

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