Laura Pendergest-Holt

A banking fraud is the use of illegal means to gain money, assets from depositors or clients fraudulently while posing as a bank, agent or any other financial institution. In many countries and especially the United States, bank fraud is a criminal offense even though experts refer to it as a white collar crime due to the manner in which it is carried out. The paper below will look at the vulnerabilities that face the banking industry while using the example of Stanford Financial Group Company to

Allen Stanford was, at one point, a successful entrepreneur whose investment company’s accounts totaled in the billions. The aforementioned keyword is ‘was.’ As CEO of Stanford Financial Group, Stanford essentially ran a massive Ponzi scheme; he issued certificates of deposit at an offshore bank that he controlled and illegally used the investors’ funds. These CD’s were appealing to investors due to their high returns of nearly twice the average rate of return of investments in U.S. banks. Investors

Over the next decade Mr. Stanford, directly assisted by James M. Davis, Stanford International Bank’s CFO, and Leroy King, Antigua’s chief banking supervisor, executed a massive Ponzi scheme. In addition, Laura Pendergest-Holt, the chief investment officer of Stanford Financial Group (“SFG”) and a member of SIB’s investment committee, gave credence to the fraudulent scheme by misrepresenting herself to investors and to the firm’s financial advisers claiming that she oversaw SIB’s entire investment