Stanford’s lawyers to make last-ditch plea to postpone trial

Attorneys for jailed Texas financier R. Allen Stanford will have one more chance to try to convince a judge to postpone his trial set to begin next week. Stanford’s attorneys are expected again to ask U.S. District Judge David Hittner for the delay during a hearing today in Houston. Hittner has denied several other requests within the last month to postpone the trial. Jury selection is to begin Monday. Stanford is accused of bilking investors out of $7 billion in a massive Ponzi scheme. Last year, he spent more than eight months under treatment in a North Carolina federal prison hospital after he was declared incompetent due to an anti-anxiety drug addiction developed while jailed in Houston. Last month, Hittner ruled Stanford was competent to stand trial. Meanwhile, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Securities Investor Protection Corp., or SIPC, are about to face off in a bitter court fight that might determine how future fraud victims are covered, raise broker fees that support the SIPC, and cast doubt on the SEC’s political independence. The dispute centers on whether more than 7,000 brokerage customers who invested in the alleged scheme run by Stanford—many of whom live in Baton Rouge—are entitled to have their losses covered by SIPC. Bloomberg has the latest on that story here.