R. Allen Stanford asked a judge to throw out the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing him of running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme, claiming the agency failed to state a case.
The SEC didn’t meet the minimum requirements for laying out the fraud case, attorneys for Stanford and businesses including his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank Ltd. said yesterday in papers filed with U.S. District Judge David Godbey in Dallas. The SEC sued last February, alleging Stanford oversaw a “massive” fraud centered on the sale of certificates of deposit through the bank.
“We’ve looked really hard at the latest complaint, and it’s 32 pages long but it doesn’t really have any specifics about what Allen Stanford said, to whom he said it or how the SEC even has jurisdiction over the CDs, because they’re not securities,” Stanford lawyer Christina Sarchio said yesterday in a phone interview.
Stanford also has been criminally indicted by a grand jury in Houston. He has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. Stanford is being held without bail in a Houston jail, awaiting a criminal trial scheduled for Jan. 24, 2011.
On Feb. 17, Godbey denied as moot an earlier defense bid to dismiss the litigation, citing revisions made by the SEC in an amended complaint.
Kevin Callahan, a spokesman for the commission, declined to comment on Stanford’s motion in an e-mail. “We stand by the allegations in our complaint,” he said.
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