DALLAS (Reuters) – Latin American investors in the unraveling financial empire of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford do not want their names published for fear they could be targeted by criminals, a lawyer said.
Dallas lawyer Stephen F. Malouf, whose firm is representing hundreds of Latin American clients who were Stanford investors, said lawyers were negotiating with the receiver overseeing the Stanford companies to keep the clients’ names from being publicly revealed.
Malouf said the clients “have concerns for their safety.”
In much of Latin America, public knowledge that a person is wealthy or has money for investment purposes can make that person or his family targets for kidnappers.
The office of the court-appointed receiver, Ralph Janvey, could not be immediately reached for comment and had not responded to an e-mail query.
Stanford, his two top aides and three of his companies are accused by US regulators of a massive securities fraud.
Clients of Bernard Madoff, accused of bilking investors out of $50 billion in a separate securities fraud case, were made public — a precedent that Malouf said his Latin American clients, which include many investors in Venezuela, did not want repeated.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission last month accused Stanford of carrying out a “massive Ponzi scheme” over at least a decade and misappropriating at least $1.6 billion of investors’ money.
His crumbling financial and investment network stretched from Houston to the Caribbean and Latin America.
