Pietersen: Stanford is a 'sleazebag' |

INVESTIGATORS examining Sir Allen Stanford’s offshore bank say that $8 billion (£5.6 billion) of investors’ money has disappeared.

Official receivers for Stanford International Bank appointed by the Antigua government have told customers that they suspect the bank was a “Ponzi scheme”, where depositors’ returns are paid from money obtained from new investors.

“The $8 billion you hear about in the media isn’t there,” one of the receivers told customers gathered outside the bank’s Antigua offices this weekend.

“We will be tracking the money in overseas banks, find a million in one, track another million to another bank. But there is nothing like $8 billion here. It appears to be a Ponzi scheme.”

It also emerged this weekend that David Collier, chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), is set to profit personally from the contract that the board had signed with Stanford to play a series of matches against teams put together by the Texan.

A member of the ECB’s 12-man executive board said he recalled their discussing a bonus for Collier relating to the Stanford deal, which was finalised last June.

“David Collier’s final pay package is dependent on him achieving a series of objectives or targets,” said Giles Clarke, the ECB’s chairman, this weekend.

“He is encouraged to meet targets set out in our ‘building partnerships’ plan and all those targets have been met this year except the performance of the men’s national team.”

One source said: “If David has received or is to receive a bonus, I think he might want to do the sensible thing and send it back.”

Collier played a leading role in talks with Stanford, meeting him in London last April and spending an evening on his yacht off Antigua on the eve of the $20m Challenge in which the players of the winning West Indies team received $1m each.

Meanwhile, five British nationals who sustained heavy losses in the Bernard Madoff US investment scandal fear they have also lost “millions” more by investing in Stanford’s empire. Lawyers at Edwin Coe, acting for the investors, believe there may be many more British victims of the Texan tycoon, who created a Swiss bank to attract wealthy people from the UK with at least $5m to invest.

British police have been asked by US law enforcement agencies to establish the size of British exposure to the Stanford empire.

Additional reporting: Simon Wilde and Robert Watts

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