Stanford Defense Experts Paid, Told to Keep Preparing for Trial

By Laurel Brubaker Calkins (Bloomberg)

R. Allen Stanford’s defense experts were ordered to keep preparing for the former financier’s trial over an alleged $7 billion investment fraud by a U.S. appellate court that also agreed to pay their back wages.

All of Stanford’s non-attorney experts quit last week after appellate judges controlling the former billionaire’s taxpayer- funded defense budget said they would limit and withhold the experts’ compensation until after conclusion of his trial, set to begin Jan. 23 in Houston federal court.

“It would be neither feasible nor economical to obtain a replacement to perform the services Marcum was expected by counsel to provide,” Circuit Judge Edith Jones, the chief of the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, said in a letter yesterday to Marcum LLP, one of the expert contractors that resigned last week from Stanford’s defense team.

The service providers were also “ordered to continue work on the case as previously planned, including the provision of testifying experts, through the end of trial, and, if required by counsel, through the conclusion of the case in the district court,” Jones said in the letter, which was posted to the court’s electronic docket.

Jones issued similar orders and agreements to pay overdue invoices to two other expert-services contractors to keep them working on Stanford’s defense. Accumyn Consulting and the Worley Group had also resigned last week over non-payment of bills dating back to September, according to court filings.

Preparation Time

Ali Fazel, Stanford’s lead criminal-defense attorney, asked U.S. District Judge David Hittner last week to delay Stanford’s trial for three months to allow more preparation time. Fazel argued that Stanford has had too little time since being declared mentally competent to adequately review documents critical to his defense.

Fazel said the defense was hampered by the resignation of all expert-services contractors on Dec. 30, after the appellate court balked at paying their bills. Jones, in her letters yesterday, said billings by Marcum and Accumyn feature “hourly rates significantly in excess of the rates payable under the Criminal Justice Act to even the most experienced attorneys.”

Jones said the court would “consider” future payments for work by Accumyn and Marcum according to a sliding schedule pegged to the beginning and end of Stanford’s criminal trial, as well as any post-trial work the firms provide. Jones didn’t require withholding for work she ordered the Worley Group to provide.

Flight Risk

Stanford, 61, has been in custody as a flight risk since he was indicted in June 2009 on charges of defrauding investors through allegedly bogus certificates of deposit at his Antigua- based Stanford International Bank. He denies any wrongdoing.

Stanford was declared mentally fit for trial on Dec. 22, after completing eight months of rehabilitation at the federal prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina. Hittner found the former financier had sufficiently recovered to understand the proceedings and assist with his defense after suffering head injuries in a September 2009 jailhouse assault and becoming addicted to anxiety drugs prescribed by prison doctors following the attack .

Hittner appointed taxpayer-funded defense attorneys for Stanford in 2010 after he found the former billionaire to be indigent. Stanford, who was ranked the 205th richest person in the U.S. in 2008 by Forbes magazine, is accused by the government of skimming more than $1 billion in investor funds to finance a lavish lifestyle of private jets, yachts and a Caribbean island.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission seized all of Stanford’s personal and corporate assets in February 2009, when it sued him on claims he ran a “massive Ponzi scheme” built on the Antiguan bank CDs. Stanford also lost access to his corporate directors and officers liability insurance last year, after underwriters won the right to refuse coverage on the basis of a guilty plea by Stanford’s former finance chief.

“Stanford, as an indigent defendant, is entitled to a solid, capable, and competent defense, not the deluxe or ‘perfect’ defense that he might have otherwise desired were he still in control of the millions (or even billions) of dollars indicative of his past lifestyle,” Hittner said in a Dec. 28 order.