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The official notices have repeatedly set deadlines that could not be met. The latest, which was issued by the Banking Superintendent on August 17 --- the eve of the date by which the intervened Stanford Bank - Panama was to have been acquired by a new company --- said that the deadline for the bank's transfer to another private entity was extended until November 18 and put the blame for this delay on a receiver appointed by a US court needing more time to consider a would-be takeover, although assuring that there had been no preliminary objection to the  proposal on the table.

It was reported in Panamanian and foreign press that the would-be new owner will be the Weston Group, headed by former HSBC Panama CEO Joseph L. Salterio. However, that depends on several things, the most important of which will be approval of a US federal district judge in Dallas. Yes, Panama's Banking Superintendent has all along protested Panama's sovereignty, its independent powers and Stanford Bank - Panama's holdings in its own right, but most of the assets of the Panamanian subsidiary of the collapsed empire of Texas financier Allen Stanford turned out not to be in Panama, and even if they are not in the United States either, the American government was in court first and has far superior financial and political clout than does Panama. Thus, although it's a Panamanian bank, our authorities have to do what their US counterparts tell them to do in this case.

Salterio's Weston Group is not to be confused with "The Weston Group Inc," a US chain of physical / occupational rehabilitation, speech therapy and assisted living facilities; nor with the British "Weston Group PLC," a developer and marketer of residential and business real estate. The assumption of a name similar to that of a company that's well known elsewhere is ordinarily one of those "warning flag" circumstances that would lead a prudent investor in a Panamanian enterprise to be alert to the possibility of fraud.

However, this is not a situation in which Salterio is an unknown pretending to be someone else. Nobody can reasonably say that he's incompetent as a banker, and those who might argue that he's dishonest have no criminal conviction to support such a claim.

Still, if US authorities or any other interested party care to look at the HSBC acquisition of Banistmo, on top of the scandalous Torrijos administration capital gains tax break that made the deal possible there would have to be other questions about the deal and Salterio's role in it. The merger has taken much longer than anticipated to be completed. One reason is that after the deal was struck and both Salterio and his boss in London had been granted large bonuses for it, HSBC then complained that it did not receive in the transaction what it had been led to believe that it would. Panama does not use the international standards embodied in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, but has a system of its own. It was said that the misunderstanding was based on this difference --- as if the veteran Panamanian banker Salterio would not have known about it.

Meanwhile in the USA, the political sides of several high-profile financial controversies are a latent explosive charge, and the Stanford case is one of them. Mostly the Texan bought his Washington influence from the Republican side of the aisle --- including major contributions to George W. Bush, Trent Lott, Richard Shelby, John Boehner and Tom DeLay. However, he also gave money to such leading Democrats as Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd, Tom Daschle, Jay Rockefeller and Martin Frost.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought down Stanford's empire by filing a civil suit alleging a multi-billion-dollar investment pyramid scheme in which his Antiguan subsidiary bank's bonds were overvalued and the investments behind them misrepresented. Only months later, after several of his top lieutenants turned state's evidence, was Stanford charged with a crime and ordered held without bail in a Texas jail.

The financier protests his innocence, and at a glance it appears that US prosecutors will hang their hats not so much on the grand ponzi scheme that was originally alleged by the SEC but on lesser or derivative alleged crimes. But in an economically troubled United States that has been battered by financial scandals, such distinctions may appear very small in the public eye.

The appearance of political influence in this case is something that judges and the court-appointed receiver in this matter want to avoid. Caution in the face of suspicion is probably one of the factors slowing the resolution of the many issues in the financial network's demise.

Plus, the case has many intricate layers. The complexity of the Stanford empire, which included more than 200 companies spread across several countries on three continents and a number of islands, may both confound investigators and be Stanford's downfall in a criminal court. A jury may decide that whether or not there's a "smoking gun" of fraud, anyone who ran such a complicated financial network must have been hiding something.

In the immediate aftermath of the SEC lawsuit, there was a mad scramble in many countries to secure assets. These efforts have in many cases been stymied, particularly because in the United States certain key documents have been withheld pending resolution of their lawyer safekeepers' claims of attorney-client privilege.

To avoid foreign courts grabbing assets present in Antigua and Barbuda, and also to stop the shutdown of its largest private employer, that Caribbean country quickly nationalized Mr. Stanford's assets. It seems, however, that Antiguan banking authorities are not going to be as uncooperative with their counterparts elsewhere as it initially appeared that they would be. Meanwhile in Venezuela, a sale that had to be put off was finally consummated at a price that Hugo Chávez's administration thought was reasonable and was about three times higher than the best bid in the initial attempt to sell Stanford's Venezuelan subsidiary bank. These international developments are indications that, fraud or no fraud, the Stanford empire's assets did not, on the whole, disappear as is usually the case in a ponzi scheme.

A number of Panamanian businesses, including some offshore investment firms whose managers surely must find it embarrassing to have been caught up in the Stanford mess, find their assets frozen in bank accounts they maintained at Stanford Bank-Panama. However, in these circles there is growing optimism that by the end of the year they will get all or at least the great majority of their money back. The bank's takeover by a new company would surely beat a liquidation in the eyes of most of its depositors. A standard liquidation would take years and divert much of the money to lawyers, after which foreigners would have to wait for all Panamanian depositors to be paid back in full before they recover anything at all. There is no bank deposit insurance in Panama.

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