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| Ann Woolner: For Stanford, a rich guy's guide to fleeing US |
| Ann Woolner / Bloomberg Feb 22, 2009, 00:47 IST |
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For financier con man Robert Vesco, Central America and the Caribbean beckoned when he was charged in the US with a $224 million mutual fund fraud.
Movie director Roman Polanski made do with Paris as his home 30 years ago to avoid jail for having sex with a 13 year-old girl in Los Angeles.
Charged with evading millions of dollars in US taxes, commodities trader Marc Rich lived openly in Switzerland for 18 years as one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives.
R Allen Stanford, on the other hand, holed up in Virginia. What’s with that?
How does a man worth billions, someone with dual citizenship, two passports, his own jets and friends around the world, turn up in Fredericksburg, Virginia?
Until then, it looked like a great escape in the making. Two days earlier the Securities and Exchange Commission accused him of an $8 billion fraud of stunning audacity and multinational reach. Suddenly, Stanford was nowhere to be found.
If he was going to flee, that was the time to go. No warrant demanded his arrest. No criminal charges filed. The feds merely needed to hand him papers: The SEC complaint and a resulting court order freezing his assets and instructing him to give up his passports.
Until then, there was nothing to stop him from leaving the country.
WHAT’S NEXT
It’s a good guess that criminal charges and an arrest warrant might eventually follow. The SEC complaint alleges deliberate and massive fraud, and ABC News reports that a Stanford plane seized in Mexico seems to tie him to a murderous drug cartel there.
So if right about now, Stanford’s picturing jetting off to some island paradise and living the good life, he’ll have to settle for his own home on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands. Americans don’t need a passport there, but it’s not an escape from the reach of US law, either.
Besides, unless he hid lots of cash or a secret bank account, he’s not going anywhere, much less living the good life. All his accounts and his businesses’ are frozen, leaving Stanford without a working credit card.
And unless he can figure out a way to sneak in, his citizenship in Antigua won’t help, either, his knightship there notwithstanding. He can’t pull a Polanski.
FRENCH SHIELD
Polanski’s French citizenship rescued him from punishment in his other homeland, the US Without it, France couldn’t have shielded him from extradition all this time.
Would Antigua protect Sir Allen, even though it has an extradition treaty with the US?
Probably not.
“Antigua is a tiny country,” says Bruce Zagaris, a Washington lawyer who edits the International Enforcement Law Reporter. “It really needs the US and England.”
Whatever goodwill Sir Allen’s businesses and multimillion-dollar cricket sponsorships generated for him there, he has suffered a sharp drop in popularity. Note the hundreds of angry investors lining up at Antigua banks wondering where their money went.
Nor could Stanford count on Switzerland, as Rich did until President Bill Clinton pardoned him in 2001. Rich benefited from Switzerland’s view that tax evasion is no crime. But if Stanford gets accused of aiding drug smugglers or defrauding investors, he can forget about a Swiss chateau.
Should he find a way to run, Stanford would be safest in a country with no extradition agreement with the US.
CUBAN CONNECTION
“The list of countries that you can go to are pretty small, and often not that attractive,” Zagaris says.
Iran, anyone? Zimbabwe?
Cuba is home to 70 fugitives from US justice, the Associated Press reports. Hijackers, cop killers, bank robbers, militant Puerto Rican nationalists and Black Panthers have found sanctuary there. And then, of course, there was Vesco.
When he fled the US in 1972, Vesco travelled by yacht and private plane around the Caribbean and Central America. He settled in Costa Rica, but a new president forced him out.
Then, to the Bahamas. Three years later, he fled again ahead of deportation orders.
“When you go to a country like Costa Rica, your welcome often is short-lived, and it’s often also very expensive,” says Zagaris, a partner in Berliner, Corcoran & Rowe. “Leaders are usually hitting you up for money.”
After dipping down in Antigua and Nicaragua, always inviting more trouble and finding it, Vesco wound up in Cuba in 1982. That’s where he died in 2007, according to the Associated Press.
Cuba is easy enough to get to from Antigua, but in 2006 it stopped granting sanctuary to Americans running from the law.
Maybe Fredericksburg isn’t such a bad place to land.
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