King loses extradition appeal, what’s next?

An appeal was yesterday struck down for Leroy King, the embattled former administrator of the Financial Services Regulatory Commission (FSRC), who is seeking to stop his extradition to the United States to face 11 fraud related charges stemming from the US$7 billion Ponzi scheme by Allen Stanford.
The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court handed down the decision during a sitting in St. Kitts. The ruling came several months after Antigua and Barbuda’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Anthony Armstrong, and King, through his lawyers, argued against and for the appeal respectively.
But, the legal journey which started several years ago, can be further prolonged if King appeals again, this time to the Privy Council. Efforts to reach his lawyer Dr. David Dorsett for comment last evening were unsuccessful.
So far though, King’s lawyers have not made any application for a stay of execution to stop the authorities in Antigua and Barbuda from turning him over to U.S. officials to finally face the court in that country which issued a warrant for him since 2009.
King lost his first challenge to his extradition in 2010, and filed numerous appeals each time he suffered another defeat in the courts.
 The last challenge was the decision of High Court Justice Darshan Ramdhani who in April last year said, having reviewed King’s arguments, he saw no reason why either King’s claim for constitutional relief or the application for leave should be allowed.
King initially faced 21 fraud related charges but these were later revised, leaving him facing 11 wire and mail fraud charges for allegedly facilitating the multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme by the disgraced Texan billionaire, Stanford, who was operating businesses in Antigua for many years.
Weeks prior to being charged, King was sacked by the government as the country’s chief financial regulatory advisor after U.S. federal authorities announced criminal charges against him, Stanford and Continued on page 4
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several of his financial group executives over what U.S. investigators said was a “massive Ponzi scheme.”
Antigua and Barbuda was at the heart of Stanford’s business empire stretching from the Caribbean to the United States, Latin America and Europe.
Antigua’s biggest bank, Stanford International Bank Ltd, sold certificates of deposit that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said bilked thousands of investors out of billions of dollars.
U.S. authorities allege King received “thousands of dollars in bribes” from Stanford to ensure the Antigua regulatory authority “looked the other way” and conducted sham audits of Stanford’s operations.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said King, acting as gamekeeper turned poacher, helped Stanford and his associates evade and obstruct U.S. probes of the Stanford business empire for several years.