Stanford (centre): he don’t like money, he loves it

To British eyes, Allen Stanford’s feather ruffling began with the million-dollar-a-man winner-takes-all cricket tournament staged in his own cricket stadium on Antigua.  At first he was hailed as the saviour of English cricket, then he advertised the Twenty20 bash by arriving at Lords in a helicopter and posing with a treasure chest full of dollar bills.

During the gaudy tournament itself, he fell out with the England cricket squad by cavorting with their wives and girlfriends on the sidelines:

But that was before the trouble started.

In January, Alex Dalmady a financial analyst in Venezuela, posted an article on the internet in which he questioned the legality of the Texan billionaire’s investment bank.

That document called “Duck Tales” was shared, blogged about and e-mailed between thousands of financiers, bankers and cricket fans around the world.

Dalmady insists that had he not published his investigation, one of the major newspapers or industry magazines would have done so.

However, it would be very difficult for the mainstream media to suggest that a financial institution was running a version of the Ponzi Scheme for fear of causing a run on the bank.

Once “Duck Tales” had done the rounds on Wall Street and the regulators were investigating, BusinessWeek was the first major publications to raise questions over Stanford’s investment vehicles.

No one could quite explain how the Stanford International Bank continued to pay-out such abnormally high investment returns despite unfavourable market conditions.

Then the police moved in, charges were laid and the obligatory link to Bernie Madoff emerged.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has ended its protracted talks with Stanford over future cricket deals but a long list of more authoritative organisations have plenty more questions for the man whose financial promises seemed too good to be true.