News Americas, HOUSTON, Texas, Fri. June, 15, 2012: Former Antigua resident and Texas-born billionaire, R. Allen Stanford, stuck to his non-guilty plea to the end but a U.S. judge still ruled he should spend the next 110 years in jail.
Stanford gave a rambling 40-minutes statement to the court in which he still denied any wrong doing. Instead, he said he was a scapegoat and blamed the U.S. federal government and a U.S.-appointed receiver who took over his companies for tearing down his business empire and preventing his investors from getting any of their money back.
But U.S. District Judge David Hittner ruled the former jet-setting mogul turned cricket entrepreneur should be jailed for 110 years as punishment for bilking investors out of more than $7 billion over 20 years, one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.
Stanford, who was once respected across the Caribbean, was sentenced following a court hearing in which two people spoke on behalf of Stanford’s investors about how his fraud had affected their lives.
Prosecutors had wanted the judge to send Stanford to jail for 230 years, the maximum sentence possible. A jury convicted the one-time billionaire in March on 13 of 14 fraud-related counts. Stanford’s convictions on conspiracy, wire and mail fraud charges followed a seven-week trial.
