Friday, 24 April 2009 Texas billionaire Stanford is pictured during an interview with Reuters in Houston When the FBI finally caught up with Allen
Stanford, the cricket-loving billionaire, to serve fraud charges on him, they found the larger-than-life Texan in the incongruous surroundings of Fredericksburg, Virginia, a sleepy commuter town close to the nation’s capital. He had taken refuge at the family home of his 30-year-old fiance, Andrea Stoelker, a modest town house that was a far cry from the mansions and castles of his privileged life further south. It is two months now since those charges were made by the finance industry’s regulator, accusing Mr Stanford of running an $8bn pyramid scheme out of a Caribbean tax haven &ndash sensational allegations that, at a stroke, brought down a man who had built an international financial empire and controversially bankrolled English cricket. Even more sinister money-laundering and other fraud accusations have been flying ever since, and Mr Stanford fully expects criminal charges any day, but he is back out in public, denying everything and fighting to clear his name. Today, his battle is joined by Ms Stoelker, who describes a couple under siege, unable to gain access to any money or even to get back into their homes to retrieve their clothes. Ms Stoelker, 29 years Mr Stanford’s junior, is herself a former employee at Stanford Group, and was put in charge of last year’s ill-fated Twenty20 tournament between the England and West Indian cricket teams. She was drawn into the media maelstrom that followed that event and the pictures of Mr Stanford cavorting with the wives and girlfriends of the England team, but that was nothing compared with the media scrum that descended on Fredericksburg in February and camped outside the family town house, with its American flag fluttering on the porch. “They even went through our bins,” she says.
She has indeed had to endure open season on her fianc’s private life, including a blizzard of reports about his past philandering and infidelities and about the six children he has fathered by various women. All the children have been supportive of their father during the past few months, Ms Stoelker said. And echoing her fianc, she added: “Any time you suffer anything like this, you see who your real friends are.”