By Observer News –
alleged multi-million dollar fraud appear to be fighting against each other, with one group accusing the other of hijacking a committee set up to ensure that all the victims are looked after.
The Stanford International Victims is claiming that despite purporting to be interested in all those who lost their savings, the Stanford Victims Coalition (SVC) is looking out only for the American investors.
In August, a judge approved a committee, made up of six former Stanford clients and John Little, a court-appointed examiner for Stanford International Bank, to work with Ralph Janvey, the court-appointed receiver for Stanford International Bank (SIB), to recover assets for the investors.
But the international investors allege that the committee has been hijacked by lawyers acting on class-action suits and a couple of American investors “fronting the Stanford Victims Coalition claiming to represent all the victims”.
They claim that once they started asking questions, they were dumped and “branded anarchists or radicals” by “the very people (SVC) who asked them to help fight for justice, just as soon as they could see a way to their own personal recovery”.
“The leader of the SVC – Angela Shaw – now states that she is only representing the Americans and is going out of her way to thwart any attempts by the International Investors to gain any information and is also trying to close down the Stanford Victims forum which is used by the International Investors to share news and comments,” the group claimed.
The international investors said this was “a double whammy” for them, coming after the failure of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for 13 years, to act against Stanford.
“Things have not gotten any better lately for the majority of the investors in the failed Stanford Bank, at least not for those who are not US citizens, who are by far the majority,” the statement said.
“Only in the United States of America could this be allowed to happen – robbed once by Stanford and then robbed again by the very people who misled so many into believing they were working to help them,” it ended.
Stanford is currently in jail in Texas awaiting his trial. That is set to begin in January next year.