MI­A­MI–An­tigua and Bar­bu­da, still reel­ing from the fraud scan­dal sur­round­ing Texas bil­lion­aire Allen Stan­ford, last Thurs­day found a new for­eign bene­fac­tor in Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez. Prime Min­is­ter Bald­win Spencer told the na­tion in a broad­cast that the left­ist Venezue­lan leader was pro­vid­ing US$50 mil­lion in ur­gent fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance to the twin-is­land state, which was at the heart of Stan­ford's far-reach­ing busi­ness em­pire that col­lapsed in Feb­ru­ary.

"To­day, I am pleased to ad­vise the na­tion that at one o'clock this morn­ing Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez signed the nec­es­sary pa­per­work to ap­prove the im­me­di­ate trans­fer of the full amount of US$50 mil­lion to the gov­ern­ment's call ac­count at the East­ern Caribbean Cen­tral Bank," Spencer said in his ad­dress. Spencer, who led his Caribbean coun­try to join Chavez's AL­BA al­liance of Latin Amer­i­can states just two months ago, said the funds would be used to help An­tigua and Bar­bu­da con­front the ef­fects of the glob­al fi­nan­cial cri­sis.

He said the Venezue­lan emer­gency help came "com­plete­ly with­out pre­con­di­tion," but gave no de­tails of the terms. An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Fi­nance Min­is­ter Harold Lovell said in a state­ment the Venezue­lan as­sis­tance would in­volve "some grant el­e­ment and a loan on very con­ces­sion­ary terms," al­though he added the terms were be­ing fi­nalised.

Stan­ford, a flam­boy­ant sports en­tre­pre­neur who was grant­ed a knight­hood by An­tigua and Bar­bu­da and was once its biggest in­vestor, faces US civ­il and crim­i­nal charges re­lat­ed to an al­leged US$7 bil­lion fraud that pros­e­cu­tors say was cen­tred on cer­tifi­cates of de­posit is­sued by his Stan­ford In­ter­na­tion­al Bank in An­tigua. Venezue­lan in­vestors were among those who suf­fered loss­es. Ac­knowl­edg­ing An­tigua's fi­nan­cial woes, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Lovell said US$35 mil­lion of the "gen­er­ous and time­ly" Venezue­lan sup­port would be used for "bud­getary sup­port," US$7 mil­lion would be em­ployed for "eco­nom­ic stim­u­lus," while US$6.5 mil­lion would go to­ward im­prov­ing ad­min­is­tra­tion of rev­enues and spend­ing. The re­main­ing US$1.5 mil­lion would be used to fund ac­tiv­i­ties and pro­grammes that pro­vide so­cial pro­tec­tion for the poor and un­em­ployed, Lovell said.

(Reuters)