It has been alleged that the Stanford Financial Group has been involved in an $8billion fraud since company formation in the 1980s.

The owner of the investment group, Sir Allen Stanford, is currently being investigated by the US Government who consider him responsible for a fraud of ‘shocking magnitude’, which revolves around the company’s $8billion certificate of investment scheme, which reportedly offered improbable and unsubstantiated interest rates.

Stanford himself is a fifth generation Texan, most famous in the UK for funding the ‘20/20 for 20’ cricket match between England and a West Indies XI. The name referred to the Twenty20 format of the game and also the fact that the winning team picked up $20million in prize money – the biggest one-off prize for a single sporting event of all time.

Many in the world of cricket were offended by the explicitly financial nature of the contest and the event itself was widely derided in the UK and even considered a failure, despite the substantial media interest it generated.

Stanford had originally committed to putting on several of these 20/20 for 20 matches over subsequent years, but since the beginning of the fraud investigation, these plans have obviously been abandoned.

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