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August 28, 2009
‘Blood Oath’ Sealed Stanford Deal, Court Is Told
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
HOUSTON — R. Allen Stanford’s relationship with the chief regulator of his Antigua bank was closer than most.
At a meeting in 2003, they became blood brothers, cutting their wrists and mixing their blood in a “brotherhood ceremony” that Mr. Stanford’s chief financial officer said promoted an elaborate scheme to hide a multibillion-dollar fraud from American and other regulators.
The assertion that the two took a “blood oath” was laid out in a plea agreement signed by the officer, James M. Davis, and filed Thursday. After the pact, Leroy King, Antigua’s chief banking supervisor, called Mr. Stanford “Big Brother.” He received Super Bowl tickets, valued at thousands of dollars, for himself and his girlfriend. And he accepted regular bribe payments from a secret Swiss bank account that Mr. Davis said he was told to handle by Mr. Stanford.
The unusual twist to the case, in which Mr. Stanford is accused of operating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, was disclosed by Mr. Davis as he pleaded guilty on Thursday to fraud and conspiracy in Federal District Court in Houston. Mr. Davis, who oversaw the movement of vast sums of money at Stanford International Bank, also said in a plea agreement that Mr. Stanford ordered him to report false revenue and false investment portfolio balances to banking regulators as far back as 1988, when Mr. Stanford ran an offshore bank on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
“I did wrong. I’m sorry. I apologize. And I take responsibility for my actions,” Mr. Davis said after the hearing.
Mr. Stanford was also supposed to appear in court on Thursday, but he was hospitalized in the morning after his pulse rate soared, his lawyer said.
While he has repeatedly denied accusations that he ran a Ponzi scheme involving certificates of deposit issued by Stanford International Bank, he has also insisted that if anything illegal did happen, it must have been Mr. Davis’s fault.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/bu...l?ref=business
C'mon man, get off the couch. There's jobs out there if you really look....jobs that use your unique talents and mean more than a paycheck, for however short the gigs will last And no bloodletting...I think
August 28, 2009
Advertising
For a Select Few, Madison Avenue Has Dream Jobs
By STUART ELLIOTT
IN 1957, the Silhouettes offered some recessionary advice in a song titled “Get a Job.” Now, during another downturn, Madison Avenue is making like an employment agency, offering fanciful jobs as prizes in sweepstakes, contests and other promotions.
The trend could be considered complementary to work that consumers have been offered for the last three years: to create advertising, primarily commercials, that appear online and on television. Such user-generated content has even turned up during the Super Bowl, the biggest day of the year on the marketing calendar.
Alas, the positions being created now will not put much of a dent in the unemployment rate. Rather, the goal is to pique the curiosity of consumers — generating attention and conversation — when they are loath to spend money on much more than necessities.
“We were looking for what would have an impact, what would stay with people,” said Danielle Courtenay, chief marketing officer for the Orlando and Orange County Visitors and Convention Bureau, in Florida. The bureau sponsored a contest to hire a pair of “smile ambassadors” whose jobs would be to visit tourist attractions and write about their experiences in social media like Twitter.
The contest, part of a tourism campaign carrying the theme “Orlando makes me smile,” offered jobs that would last 67 days. (The idea is it would take the winners that long to see more than 100 local sights, from museums to theme parks to alligator wrestling.) The pay: $25,000 for the pair to cover expenses back home, a condominium in downtown Orlando, a rental car, cameras and cellphones.
The contest drew more than 300 entries from 12 countries, Ms. Courtenay said, which were winnowed to 10 pairs of finalists who attended a “boot camp” last month where they practiced the duties of their potential jobs.
•
The winners, a pair of 25-year-old friends from New York, started work this week, blogging at 67daysofsmiles.com and tweeting on Twitter.com/67Days; their reports can also be found on Facebook (facebook.com/visitorlando).Most of such offbeat jobs are being created by and for travel marketers, which are suffering significantly as the recession discourages consumer wanderlust. Perhaps the best known was a recent contest sponsored by the organization Tourism Queensland offering the “best job in the world”: a six-month gig to be a caretaker on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef in the Queensland state of Australia and chronicle the experience.
The winner of that contest, which drew more than 34,000 entries, was a Briton, Ben Southall, who went to work on July 1, filing reports on Twitter (twitter.com/Bensouthall) and a blog (islandreefjob.com.au).
Estimates are that the Queensland campaign, which cost about $1 million, received worldwide publicity worth 150 times that. The campaign, which also won numerous advertising awards, was created by Cummins Nitro, part of the Nitro Group unit of Sapient.
The contest inspired a follow-up campaign, which began this week, featuring four of the 16 finalists promoting vacations in Queensland as the “best holiday in the world.” But it does not seem that lightning is striking again; critics are complaining about the commercials because they use a reworked version of a 43-year-old American tune, the theme song from the TV series “The Monkees.”
Another travel marketer offering jobs is the Republic of Taiwan Tourism Bureau, with a contest called the Best Trip in the World (taiwanbesttrip.net). The offer: “Come up with the best Taiwan tour itinerary, take the tour, write about it online” and win a million Taiwan dollars (about $30,000) for a one-month trip around the island.
As for fanciful jobs outside the realm of tourism, a British Web site devoted to soccer, goal.com, is sponsoring a writing contest. The prize of a one-month internship that will allow the winner to attend Premier League matches as an accredited journalist.
But a report on goal.com on Tuesday, announcing the 12 semi-finalists selected to proceed in the contest, highlighted a pitfall of giving away jobs in hard times: “Regular readers will note that we are slightly late in tabulating the results. This is because the contest was sadly stricken by vote fraud.”
The irregularities included entrants voting “for themselves more than once,” according to goal.com.
No such problems apparently cropped up during the Florida effort to hire smile ambassadors. Nor were there complaints, Ms. Courtenay said, that a contest during a recession with jobs as prizes trivializes how difficult it may be to find work.
In fact, the contest is providing a job to one of the two winners, Kyle Post, who in a phone interview wryly described his recent life this way: “I was busy being an unemployed actor.” (He had most recently worked in the Broadway production of “Rent.”)
•
The other winner, his friend, Stacey Doornbos, said she had quit her job at a community center in East Harlem after she and Mr. Post won the contest.
“It’s not just a vacation,” Ms. Doornbos said of their duties as smile ambassadors. “It is a job.”
She may be right: The pair’s first work — a post on Twitter of a photograph showing the view from the balcony of their condo — came at 5:58 a.m. on Wednesday
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/bu...rtising&st=cse
August 28, 2009
At a meeting in 2003, they became blood brothers, cutting their wrists and mixing their blood in a “brotherhood ceremony” that Mr. Stanford’s chief financial officer said promoted an elaborate scheme to hide a multibillion-dollar fraud from American and other regulators.
The assertion that the two took a “blood oath” was laid out in a plea agreement signed by the officer, James M. Davis, and filed Thursday. After the pact, Leroy King, Antigua’s chief banking supervisor, called Mr. Stanford “Big Brother.” He received Super Bowl tickets, valued at thousands of dollars, for himself and his girlfriend. And he accepted regular bribe payments from a secret Swiss bank account that Mr. Davis said he was told to handle by Mr. Stanford.
The unusual twist to the case, in which Mr. Stanford is accused of operating a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, was disclosed by Mr. Davis as he pleaded guilty on Thursday to fraud and conspiracy in Federal District Court in Houston. Mr. Davis, who oversaw the movement of vast sums of money at Stanford International Bank, also said in a plea agreement that Mr. Stanford ordered him to report false revenue and false investment portfolio balances to banking regulators as far back as 1988, when Mr. Stanford ran an offshore bank on the Caribbean island of Montserrat.
“I did wrong. I’m sorry. I apologize. And I take responsibility for my actions,” Mr. Davis said after the hearing.
Mr. Stanford was also supposed to appear in court on Thursday, but he was hospitalized in the morning after his pulse rate soared, his lawyer said.
While he has repeatedly denied accusations that he ran a Ponzi scheme involving certificates of deposit issued by Stanford International Bank, he has also insisted that if anything illegal did happen, it must have been Mr. Davis’s fault.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/bu...l?ref=business
C'mon man, get off the couch. There's jobs out there if you really look....jobs that use your unique talents and mean more than a paycheck, for however short the gigs will last And no bloodletting...I think
August 28, 2009
The trend could be considered complementary to work that consumers have been offered for the last three years: to create advertising, primarily commercials, that appear online and on television. Such user-generated content has even turned up during the Super Bowl, the biggest day of the year on the marketing calendar.
Alas, the positions being created now will not put much of a dent in the unemployment rate. Rather, the goal is to pique the curiosity of consumers — generating attention and conversation — when they are loath to spend money on much more than necessities.
“We were looking for what would have an impact, what would stay with people,” said Danielle Courtenay, chief marketing officer for the Orlando and Orange County Visitors and Convention Bureau, in Florida. The bureau sponsored a contest to hire a pair of “smile ambassadors” whose jobs would be to visit tourist attractions and write about their experiences in social media like Twitter.
The contest, part of a tourism campaign carrying the theme “Orlando makes me smile,” offered jobs that would last 67 days. (The idea is it would take the winners that long to see more than 100 local sights, from museums to theme parks to alligator wrestling.) The pay: $25,000 for the pair to cover expenses back home, a condominium in downtown Orlando, a rental car, cameras and cellphones.
The contest drew more than 300 entries from 12 countries, Ms. Courtenay said, which were winnowed to 10 pairs of finalists who attended a “boot camp” last month where they practiced the duties of their potential jobs.
•
The winners, a pair of 25-year-old friends from New York, started work this week, blogging at 67daysofsmiles.com and tweeting on Twitter.com/67Days; their reports can also be found on Facebook (facebook.com/visitorlando).Most of such offbeat jobs are being created by and for travel marketers, which are suffering significantly as the recession discourages consumer wanderlust. Perhaps the best known was a recent contest sponsored by the organization Tourism Queensland offering the “best job in the world”: a six-month gig to be a caretaker on Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef in the Queensland state of Australia and chronicle the experience.
The winner of that contest, which drew more than 34,000 entries, was a Briton, Ben Southall, who went to work on July 1, filing reports on Twitter (twitter.com/Bensouthall) and a blog (islandreefjob.com.au).
Estimates are that the Queensland campaign, which cost about $1 million, received worldwide publicity worth 150 times that. The campaign, which also won numerous advertising awards, was created by Cummins Nitro, part of the Nitro Group unit of Sapient.
The contest inspired a follow-up campaign, which began this week, featuring four of the 16 finalists promoting vacations in Queensland as the “best holiday in the world.” But it does not seem that lightning is striking again; critics are complaining about the commercials because they use a reworked version of a 43-year-old American tune, the theme song from the TV series “The Monkees.”
Another travel marketer offering jobs is the Republic of Taiwan Tourism Bureau, with a contest called the Best Trip in the World (taiwanbesttrip.net). The offer: “Come up with the best Taiwan tour itinerary, take the tour, write about it online” and win a million Taiwan dollars (about $30,000) for a one-month trip around the island.
As for fanciful jobs outside the realm of tourism, a British Web site devoted to soccer, goal.com, is sponsoring a writing contest. The prize of a one-month internship that will allow the winner to attend Premier League matches as an accredited journalist.
But a report on goal.com on Tuesday, announcing the 12 semi-finalists selected to proceed in the contest, highlighted a pitfall of giving away jobs in hard times: “Regular readers will note that we are slightly late in tabulating the results. This is because the contest was sadly stricken by vote fraud.”
The irregularities included entrants voting “for themselves more than once,” according to goal.com.
No such problems apparently cropped up during the Florida effort to hire smile ambassadors. Nor were there complaints, Ms. Courtenay said, that a contest during a recession with jobs as prizes trivializes how difficult it may be to find work.
In fact, the contest is providing a job to one of the two winners, Kyle Post, who in a phone interview wryly described his recent life this way: “I was busy being an unemployed actor.” (He had most recently worked in the Broadway production of “Rent.”)
•
The other winner, his friend, Stacey Doornbos, said she had quit her job at a community center in East Harlem after she and Mr. Post won the contest.
“It’s not just a vacation,” Ms. Doornbos said of their duties as smile ambassadors. “It is a job.”
She may be right: The pair’s first work — a post on Twitter of a photograph showing the view from the balcony of their condo — came at 5:58 a.m. on Wednesday
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/bu...rtising&st=cse
Maybe he was just very frugal, who knows. But I bet his client didn't know he lived like that.
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