Mr. Dalmady visited SIB's website, downloaded the bank's financial statements and analysed them. He then presented his unequivocal conclusion to his friend: "Roberto, take your money out YESTERDAY." And this Roberto proceeded to do, somewhat slowly, but he was out by December 2008.
However, Mr. Dalmady's curiosity had been piqued and he kept on investigating SIB (all from his desk in Florida and using the limitless power of the Internet-Yay!). In January 2009, he sat down and wrote up his findings in an article that was published in the January 2009 issue of the monthly newsletter of VenEconomia (VenEconomy in English), a leading Venezuelan economic and financial publisher.
The article was entitled "Duck Tales". An English version is posted here.
Why "Duck Tales"? Well, here's the synopsis of the article:
One does not have to be a detective, or even a financial expert, to spot financial institutions that may prove insolvent, or worse, with the passage of time. As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck, if it waddles like a duck and if it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.Mr. Dalmady tells his tale in a witty and entertaining style. Unfortunately, the moral of the tale is not quite so amusing. SIB appeared to be a "duck", a massive financial fraud.
And so it has proved to be.
Mr. Dalmady's article ignited the blogosphere when it was posted on Miguel Octavio's blog on 9 February 2009. From there, the story was picked up by the mainstream media and the rest is very recent financial history. U. S. federal authorities (and no doubt other authorities elsewhere) are now investigating SIB and its flamboyant owner, R. Allen Stanford, Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of the Nation (Antigua and Barbuda), World Finance's 2008 Man of the Year, and Forbes List billionaire (Forbes also has an in-depth profile of Mr. Stanford and features him in its Secrets Of The Self-Made series).
All this, the result of one single individual, Mr. Dalmady, applying his own mind to the facts that everybody else was seeing, but missing the significance of.
Truly, the Power of One.
2 comments:
Thanks. I think you understand why the "duck" had to be "duck" and not "Stanford International is a $8 bn fraud". Stanford and the like feed off Trust. To destroy "Trust" you have to use a language everyone can understand.
Alex Dalmady
Thank you Alex. Your article was a fine example of how to give a clear, understandable, yet technically sound, explanation of quite a specialised area of knowledge (financial analysis, in this case). And of intellectual courage.
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