Stanford Super Series with the Superstars and England. The tournament collapsed following the arrest (and subsequent conviction) of Allen Stanford for an $8 billion fraud, part of which funded the prize money for the Super Series. Allen Stanford proposed emphasizing Twenty20 cricket as a way to promote cricket in the West Indies. He created the Stanford 20/20, a yearly tournament featuring teams from the island nations that made up the West Indies. From the first edition of his tournament in 2006 he aimed to have the best players from his tournament play as a team against an international team. Initially South Africa had
Allen Stanford leaked cable message from the U.S. Embassy in the Bahamas reported as early as 2006 that companies under Stanford's control were "rumored to engage in bribery, money laundering, and political manipulation". The U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas at the time was reported to have "managed to stay out of any one-on-one photos with Stanford" during a charity breakfast event. Federal agents raided the offices of Stanford Financial on February 17, 2009, and treated it as "a kind of crime scene—cautioning people not to leave fingerprints". The SEC charged Stanford with "massive ongoing fraud" centered on an eight-billion-dollar investment scheme. Stanford's