Stanford Ex-Chief Investment Officer Jailed

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Published on Saturday, 15 September 2012 14:12

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(Antigua Observer): TEXAS, – Laura Pendergest Holt, the former chief investment officer for convicted Texas financier Allen Stanford, has been sentenced to three years in jail for obstructing a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) probe of Standford’s US $7 billion Ponzi scheme involving his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank (SIB).

US District Judge David Hittner imposed the sentence here on Pendergest Holt, 39, on Thursday. She was the third-highest- ranking executive in Stanford’s firm.

“I’m sorry that I was so trusting … he didn’t deserve my trust,” she told the court, referring to her former boss. “And, in so trusting, I harmed others.”

Hittner agreed with Assistant US Attorney Jason Varnado, the prosecutor arguing the government’s case, that Pendergest Holt be taken into custody rather than allowed to report to prison next month, as she had asked.

Holt’s lawyer, Chris Flood, had argued for home confinement or assignment to a halfway house, saying that federal sentencing guidelines might have left her with as little as a one-year term instead of the three she agreed to. But Varnado countered that a guideline-based sentence probably would have been just three months less.

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