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What investors got for $5 million
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(February 23, 2009 - Monday) - By TOM FOWLER
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Feb. 23, 2009, 7:10AM
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6275946.html
Investors willing to entrust $5 million to Stanford International Bank got the royal treatment in a Caribbean paradise.
There was the flight to Antigua on one of the company’s private jets, lunch at the festive Sticky Wicket restaurant, a one-on-one presentation from the bank president and senior investment officer and a dinner party at the exclusive Pavilion restaurant. Snorkeling, an island tour and other outings were also common, all part of the effort to impress existing investors or woo new ones.
But when investors asked probing questions — like how the bank made market-beating profits year after year or how investments were monitored — a polite but persistent shroud came down, according to documents filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week in a civil fraud case.
“I was trained not to divulge too much information,” said Michael Zarich, the former senior investment officer with the bank, in a transcript of interviews done by SEC agents earlier this month.
The documents form the foundation for the civil complaint the SEC filed against the bank, two Houston-based financial services companies, Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford and two other executives in his companies, Jim Davis and Laura Pendergest-Holt. The SEC alleges the defendants exaggerated claims about returns on certificates of deposit and a mutual fund in order to attract investors to buy the products and veteran financial advisers to sell them.
Zarich went to work for Stanford in 1999 and was tapped for the Antigua post in 2005. At first he thought he would have access to all of the bank’s investments, including the single largest portion, known internally as Tier Three. But over time it became clear he had access to information about less than 20 percent of the banks’ assets, and that only Davis and Stanford had access to more.
Zarich’s half of a tag-team presentation to investors with the bank’s president, Juan Rodriguez-Tolentino, stressed the safety of the investments — that 20 analysts in the company’s Memphis office monitored investments spread among 25 banks and funds throughout the world. But Zarich said he never mentioned that those analysts didn’t keep tabs on the Tier Three funds.
And if investors asked why Stanford used an obscure accounting firm in Antigua, CAS Hewlett & Co., he would tell clients a larger firm would take a chunk out of their investment returns, and besides, big accounting firms were far from perfect, the documents show.
He’d note “that such-and-such audited Enron. Did that do you any good?” — apparentlyreferring to accounting giant Arthur Andersen, which collapsed after it was indicted, accused of destroying records related to its Enron audit work.
No ‘confidence’
Zarich was hardly the only person at Stanford in the dark about how the company made its claimed high returns, according to the documents. Steve Riordan spent nearly two years as a consultant helping the company try to reconcile conflicts in its own data about returns and what clients were seeing.
In an SEC interview, Riordan said when he reviewed the data the returns sometimes seemed plausible, but at other times “in my estimation there was not any way in hell that return is correct.”
After a while Riordan said he stopped relying on any data he received from the bank in Antigua. “I didn’t have any confidence in any of the documents that they had sent to me,” he said.
Even one of the defendants in the SEC case, Pendergest-Holt, said she didn’t know how Tier Three funds were managed. She has worked for Stanford since 1997 and has known Davis since she was a teenager .
“Do you have any idea at all if anyone helps Mr. Davis with Tier Three?” an agent asked in her deposition.
“I do not, no. I have no idea,” she replied.
“You guys office, basically, next to each other for the most part and you’ve never said to him, ‘Hey, who manages this monster over here, Tier Three?’”
“No, in all sincerity,” she said.
Riordan said he and his supervisor at Stanford one day discussed how “it was just kind of amazing to us to work some place so long and not know … Not know anything. Just not even know what this thing was and how it worked and, you know, how to report on it and how to calculate returns.”
“So for all your time and all (the supervisor’s) time, the bank essentially remained a black box?” an SEC official asked.
“Mystery,” Riordan replied.
tom.fowler@chron.com
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