Even by the crazy, mercenary, hit-and-run standards of modern cricket the sudden disappearance in disgrace of billionaire moneybags, Sir Allen Stanford, is an extraordinary
development. It is also, especially for the English, with whom he struck a special relationship, a huge embarrassment. Barely three months ago, the 58-year-old Texan tycoon was living it up in Antigua. Rubbing shoulders with cricket heroes such as Viv Richards and Ian Botham. Flirting with players’ wives and girlfriends. Dispensing seemingly limitless largesse. That evening he handed out $US1 million cheques to each member of the West Indian team, re-named the Stanford Superstars for the occasion, which had just beaten England in the inaugural Twenty/20 Stanford Super Series. World cricket, scrambling to create a new order which would reconcile the various forms of the game,and its warring parties, could scarcely believe its good fortune. It all seemed just too, too super to be true. So it has proved. Last night, US federal agents confirmed they did not know the whereabouts of Stanford who is accused, with two colleagues, of what the Texas security commission called “a fraud of shocking magnitude that has spread its tentacles throughout the world.” There have also been unconfirmed reports that he is being investigated by the FBI after he was linked to laundering drug money for Mexico’s Gulf cartel.
Those counting the cost include millions of private investors, the English cricket board, who may have forgotten to demand that Stanford “show us the money”, the inhabitants of Antigua and Barbuda, a fifth of which worked for him, and his other sports “ambassadors”.