• Advocate business staff
• Published: Jan 3, 2010 - Page: 4F

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A roundup of many other headlines from 2009 ran the gamut from Baton Rouge-area investors’ getting caught up in what prosecutors alleged are ponzi schemes to stories about  merger battles and hospital expansions:

STANFORD GROUP: In February, federal regulators seized assets and closed offices of the Stanford Group Co. amid allegations that founder R. Allen Stanford orchestrated a Ponzi scheme, one in which investors buying certificates of deposit from Stanford’s Antigua operations had their funds transferred to pay off other investors.

Included in the $7.2 billion that Stanford’s company is alleged to have mishandled is an estimated $1 billion from investors in Covington, Lafayette and Baton Rouge, where the Houston firm’s Private Client Group was based.

Stanford, who turns 60 in March, remained in federal custody awaiting a trial in early 2011. In November, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ordered a Dallas-based overseer to release much of the $894 million in remaining Stanford assets to investors while funds belonging to Stanford advisers would remain frozen.

GULF REGION GUARANTY: A Tickfaw man with offices in Baton Rouge, Hammond, Covington and Lake Charles allegedly stole $19.5 million from about 160 people, many of them retirees, through an investment scheme.

In late November, a federal grand jury indicted Matthew B. Pizzolato on 52 counts of mail fraud, two counts of wire fraud, seven counts of money laundering, one count of securities fraud, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Pizzolato operated a Ponzi scheme from 2005 to 2008 using ads in the local daily newspapers in New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Hammond, according to the indictment. Pizzolato used several company names, including Gulf Region Guaranty, and promised high returns on guaranteed investments. But the “returns” investors received were either small portions of their own money or that of other investors, prosecutors allege.

Instead, they said Pizzolato used the investors’ money to buy luxury items and to build a new half-million dollar home in Ponchatoula.

WORKER’S COMP PROGRAM: In February, the Louisiana Workforce Commission announced a joint program with the Attorney General’s Office to create a worker’s compensation fraud detection program. Though state employers pay nearly $1 billion a year into the system, the commission estimated one in five employers were violating state law by not paying premiums.

MERGER BATTLE: Two Donaldsonville ammonia fertilizer plants, with combined employment of more than 500 workers, awaited the resolution of corporate hostile takeover bids that lasted throughout the year. CF Industries Holdings Inc., a larger firm with the bigger Donaldsonville production, wants to buy Terra Industries Inc. Meanwhile, Agrium Inc. of Canada wants to buy CF. None of the bids was successful by the end of the year.

OCHSNER EXPANSION: Ochsner Health System said it would enter the Baton Rouge labor and delivery market, adding birth services in early 2010 at its O’Neal Lane hospital in an $8 million renovation project.

Ochsner and Lafayette-based LHC Group Inc. also announced a joint venture involving five home health agencies, and the partners also bought a long-term, acute-care hospital in Kenner.

NORTH OAKS: The end of volatility and uncertainty in the bond market allowed North Oaks Medical Center in Hammond  to move forward on major construction projects halted in December 2008 and January.