Determined to avoid being caught with their pants down, the SEC is all up in any suspected financial impropriety these days.  Case in point, Houston-based investment firm Stanford Financial Group, currently undergoing an unlubricated months-long reaming at the hands of the SEC and Chairwoman Schapiro’s old gig, FINRA.  Stanford, it seems, has been offering CDs that pay over twice as much as CDs from…well, just about anywhere, and that seems a little suspect.  A little Madoff-esque, according to one former employee:

De Maria, a former newspaper journalist, charged the firm “was operating a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme” by using money from the offshore bank “to finance its growing brokerage business.” The lawsuit, filed in in 2006 in Miami-Dade County Circuit Court in Florida, also charged the firm was attracting clients to the bank by selling CDs with “artificially high yields.” De Maria, also a former president of the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce in New York, said in his suit that the more questions he asked about the company’s business practices, the more “marginalized” he became.

A particular arm of Stanford, Stanford International Bank, Ltd., operates offices in Antigua where the curiously high-yielding CDs are actually being sold because there is nothing less suspicious than an offshore bank with unnaturally high payouts catering to wealthy investors in a time of dire economic crisis.

Edit: Yes, I know the beginning of the investigation stretches back as much as three years, long before Schapiro took over at SEC.  Truth is, I had made that picture for her nomination back in December but alyx beat me to it, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it.  So there.

ACTUAL UPDATE: Ha ha, US Marshals got all up IN the company’s Houston offices, and terms like “massive fraud” are being bandied about.  Allegations are that this is indeed another Ponzi scheme, but only on the order of a mere $8b or so, so who cares.  CEO Allen Stanford is being charged, and has had his assets (and those of his companies) frozen, and CFO James Davis and CI[nvestment]Officer Laura Pendergrast-Holt are also charged.  Officially, the trio are charged with falsifying historical return data and misrepresenting the safety of deposits, and running a second scheme tied to a mutual fund product, because if it worked so well the first time, the best way to avoid attention is to do the very same thing a second time.