After successfully beating the OCC and suing for $4 million in damages, Carlos Loumiet (now at DLA Piper) finds himself the subject of a suit by the receiver overseeing the R. Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme:
"As a partner at Greenberg Traurig and then Hunton & Williams, Carlos Loumiet helped design the basic architecture of the Ponzi scheme by helping Stanford establish and operate unlicensed foreign bank offices in the U.S. and essentially hijacking the sovereign island nation of Antigua through the use of political corruption, loans made with funds stolen from Stanford's investors, and even writing the laws that governed Stanford International Bank's operations," said plaintiff attorney Ed Snyder, who filed the complaint, in a prepared statement.More allegations from the suit here.
Denies impropriety
Loumiet denied any wrongdoing.
"I can say that I have never in my long career knowingly helped any client commit any wrongdoing," Loumiet said in a prepared statement. "I have never represented anyone that I knew was engaged in wrongdoing. And after years of investigations by the federal government and months of trials involving Allen Stanford and his codefendants, I have not been implicated in any wrongdoing."
Likewise, the two named law firms said they had no idea what was going on. Hunton & Williams called the suit "factually and legally baseless and an overreach by Stanford Financial Group's understandably frustrated investors."
The attorney for Greenberg Traurig, Jim Cowles, said the lawsuit is just one more in a series of legal actions intended to "pry open a deep pocket" in order to compensate victims.
If Carlos beats this one too, he'll be keeping my friend Andres Rivero plenty busy.
In other news, Spencer Aronfeld speaks through an old Campbell's soup can about the recent Lawyers to the Rescue Hurricane Sandy fundraiser:
Spence -- hire a sound guy!
