While many Lafayette area Stanford victims have yet to seek legal action to recover their losses, Acadiana Business has confirmed that at least a dozen have turned to Baton Rouge attorney Ed Gonzales to represent them.
“It should be obvious to all concerned that the investors as a whole were defrauded,” says Gonzales, declining to elaborate on the type of investigation he is conducting on his clients’ behalf. “I have been retained by a group of Louisiana and Texas investors to help them evaluate the accumulated evidence of fraud concerning Stanford International Bank, and to assist in the recovery of their losses,” he adds. “It is my clients’ intention that this effort benefit all of the people who have been affected by this scheme.”
Sources familiar with the group seeking legal advice from Gonzales, a former federal prosecutor in the Middle District of Louisiana for more than a decade, say potential individual losses to local investors may be as high as $28 million. The former prosecutor would not confirm that figure and could not yet give a clear indication of when the suit would be filed.
Read more about the Louisiana attorney general's criminal inquiry into the Stanford debacle and the local impact of the alleged scam in this month's Turk File in Acadiana Business, a sister publication of The Independent Weekly.