UK: Serious Fraud Office Looking at Stanford Link
February 19th, 2009Via: Reuters:
The Serious Fraud Office is monitoring a possible link from the scandal surrounding Texas billionaire Allen Stanford after media reports that his firm was audited from the United Kingdom.
Antigua-based accounting firm C.A.S. Hewlett, which the Evening Standard reported had audited Stanford’s books, moved its operations to London after its founder Charlesworth ‘Shelley’ Hewlett died last month, newspapers said.
“It’s a situation where there is the possibility there may be a UK link and so we are monitoring the situation,” a spokesman for the SFO said.
“It’s not the case that we have launched investigators at it. We are making contact and liaising with other authorities,” the spokesman also said.
C.A.S. Hewlett has offices in a number of London addresses, but the numbers were either disconnected, or rang out.
Two people with neighbouring businesses in Enfield, a residential suburb north of London, told Reuters that C.A.S. Hewlett had let a small office in the building on Southbury Road, but that the employees left some four years ago.
One of the two said that about once a month she saw a handful of “middle-aged people” going to and from the Hewlett offices, but could offer no further details.
The SEC this week charged Stanford — who is also a high-profile cricket promoter — with an $8 billion (5.6 billion pound) fraud, causing long queues of angry depositors in several countries.
