Career
Stanford started in business in Waco, Texas, opening a bodybuilding gym that failed. His first success in business came from speculating in real estate in Houston after the Texan oil bubble burst in the early 1980s; his partner in this venture was his father, James: the two men made a fortune in the 1980s, buying up depressed real estate and selling it years later as the market recovered. After his father retired in 1993, Stanford took control of a company with 500 employees.
Stanford moved to the Caribbean in the 1980s, first to Montserrat, then to Antigua. With Stanford Finance, he started a bank on the island of Montserrat in 1985, Guardian International Bank; he moved it to Antigua during a British crackdown on Montserrat's offshore-banking industry in the 1980s, renaming it Stanford International Bank, an affiliate of Stanford Financial.
Early in 2007, Stanford and Baldwin Spencer, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda and formerly an ally, began verbally feuding in public.
In 2009, Antigua's Financial Services Regulatory Commission named a British firm, Vantis Business Recovery Services, the receiver for Stanford International Bank and Stanford Trust Company, the Associated Press reported.
Read more about this topic: Allen Stanford
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)