Two former Stanford Financial Group Cos. employees oversaw destruction of stacks of corporate records in defiance of a court order to preserve them after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued company founder R. Allen Stanford, a federal prosecutor told a Miami jury.
“There was nothing routine about this shred,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Klecka told the jury of 10 men and two women at the outset of the trial today.
Defendants Thomas Raffanello and Bruce Perraud are accused of obstructing the SEC proceeding and destroying records sought in a federal investigation. They have denied the charges.
The trial before Judge Richard W. Goldberg is the first linked to what U.S. prosecutors and regulators have described as a $7 billion fraud scheme led by Stanford and run through his Antigua-based bank.
Perraud, a global security specialist in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, office of Houston-based Stanford Financial Group, was indicted in May for allegedly destroying records. Raffanello was added to the case in a revised indictment announced in September
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