Speaker Series: Camilo Arturo Leslie

When the Stanford Financial Group imploded in 2009, roughly 20,000 depositors were left $7 billion poorer, and the firm’s political, corporate, and celebrity backers were left with egg on their face. In the next year, however, crucial private and public regulators released mea culpas detailing their longstanding failures to diagnose and arrest the fraud. The fallout was severe, with media figures, defrauded investors, and even members of congress accusing those regulators of complicity. Using internal SEC interview transcripts acquired via years of FOIA requests, Dr. Leslie shows that the truth is both murkier and both revealing, on two counts. First, the Stanford fraud provides an emblematic case of “expert ignorance.” Second, it makes the line between administrative discretion and corruption impossible to draw.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Dr. Camilo Arturo Leslie works in the areas of economic sociology and the sociology of law, with a comparative focus on the U.S. and Latin America. Theoretically, Leslie examines the institutional and ideational supports of legitimacy, trust, and ignorance. Leslie’s main line of research surveys the rise and fall of the Stanford Financial Group fraud, a decades-long Ponzi scheme that left roughly 20,000 victims with $7.2 billion in losses.