FBI agents have arrested the chief investment officer of troubled Stanford Financial Group, accusing Laura Pendergest-Holt of obstructing a Securities and Exchange Commission fraud investigation. The SEC has been investigating allegations of an $8 billion investment fraud involving Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford's financial group. Stanford was served legal papers by FBI agents last week and ordered to surrender his passport, but has not been charged with a crime. Pendergest-Holt was arrested Thursday in Houston, where Stanford Financial Group is based. The FBI said she was taken to the federal detention center and would appear in federal court Friday morning for an arraignment. “She is looking forward to working with the government to get all the facts out and put this behind her,” her attorney Brent Baker said Thursday night. The government alleges in a federal complaint that Pendergest-Holt obstructed the investigation with some of her answers to SEC investigators' questions, including failing to reveal to the SEC how much she knew about investments in Stanford International Bank Ltd. The FBI said in an affidavit that Pendergest-Holt repeatedly misrepresented how much she knew about the bank's Tier III portfolio, which represented about 81 percent of the bank's portfolio, and did not let the SEC investigators know that she had learned of a $1.6 billion loan to a shareholder.
