You really do want to start reading up on Bernie Cornfeld and Investors Overseas Services.
It is my suspicion, a purely personal opinion only, that it will help you a great deal in writing about Sir Allen Stanford in coming weeks and months.
You really do want to start reading up on Bernie Cornfeld and Investors Overseas Services.
It is my suspicion, a purely personal opinion only, that it will help you a great deal in writing about Sir Allen Stanford in coming weeks and months.
What I remember best about Bernie was that Victoria Principal was his girlfriend.
I seem to remember that Cornfield’s model was the U.S. mutual fund called IDS (Investors
Diversified Services), with whom Nixon was at one time associated, and which did very well as a conservative vehicle for middle-class and working-class investors of fairly modest means.
I also remember that they couldn’t seem to pin much in the way of intentional fraud on Bernie and that it seemed his faults were more on the order of inattention, disorganization, and trying to do too much in the way of sales without the necessary attention paid to getting the money invested in anything, let alone good investment picks. At the time, news accounts said that the Geneva offices were actually crammed with cash turned in by the salesmen; in some rooms, there were simply stacks of cardboard boxes of cash and in others, nothing but cash from floor to ceiling, as yet unsorted even as to denomination
(and the cash was in a number of the European currencies of the time). Apparently, he’d hit a real European hunger for an investment vehicle of the mutual fund variety that hadn’t been previously recognized.