Baton Rouge victims of Stanford financial fraud meet with Sen. Vitter to push for compensation

Investors who lost millions of dollars by purchasing fraudulent certificates of deposit from Allen Stanford’s Texas-based financial firm are fighting the nomination to a federal board of a lawyer who they say fought compensation from an industry-financed reimbursement fund. Some of them met in Baton Rouge Thursday with Sen. David Vitter, R-La. They encouraged Vitter to keep up his fight against the nomination of Sharon Bowen, acting chair of the Securities Investment Protection Corp., which oversees the reimbursement fund for fraudulent investment schemes, to a seat on the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The SIPC successfully went to federal court to fight reimbursement of Stanford victims. In 2012, Allan Stanford, the former board of directors chairman of Stanford International Bank (SIB), was sentenced to 110 years in prison for what the federal government said was orchestrating a 20-year investment fraud scheme in which he misappropriated $7 billion to finance his personal businesses. Many of the victimized investors are from Baton Rouge and Lafayette. More on Nola.com here.