Allen Stanford's cheap publicity

Vijay Singh, Michael Owen, Jim Courier, the West Indies cricket team.....they all accepted largesse in one form or another from Allen Stanford, now unmasked as this month's Bernie Madoff. Here's the thing though: it seems as though a lot of them redeposited the loot into Stanford's "bank", so that in effect Stanford received their services for free. Good luck to them in getting their hands on the moolah now. Vijay, Michael and Jim will no doubt scrape by, but it's hard not to feel for the Windies cricketers, for whom the money was, or would have been, genuinely life-changing.

I've always believed that Roman Abramovich's involvement with Chelsea was about laundering himself rather than his money. Stanford's activities in Antigua, and his efforts to insinuate himself into world cricket, were similar in some ways, though choosing Antigua, with its recent history of violence and drug running, may not have been the smartest move. Besides, whereas Abramovich is about as low key as a multi-billionaire with six yachts can reasonably be, Stanford is, well, a bit of a git, and a flash one at that. The joy in the UK media at his sudden unmasking would be unseemly to behold, but for the fact that he so richly deserves it.

One interesting angle on this is that Stanford had to leave the US in order to build himself a dominant position in sport. In the land of winner-takes-all capitalism, professional sport is the closest thing there is to a co-operative enterprise. Sure, there are some big name owners with a taste for publicity: George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees comes to mind. However, football, basketball and baseball are all organised in such a way as to ensure that rich guys can't build invincible dynasties. It simply wouldn't have served Stanford's purposes to buy into a small-market team, say Green Bay, and throw his money around there, and he didn't have enough cash to compete with the Abramoviches et al in European football. So he ended up in the West Indies, bankrolling a sport that he didn't even like.

The US authorities believe that Madoff and Stanford may be only the tip of a humungous iceberg of fraud. Reportedly there are more than 500 possibly dodgy schemes under investigation. On the TV show Hustle, they like to say that you can't con an honest man. Unfortunately it looks as if you can, as long as you have a banking license.