Laura Pendergest Holt, the former chief investment officer for Stanford Financial Group Co., was sentenced to three years in prison for obstructing a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe of a $7 billion Ponzi scheme at the company, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Pendergest Holt was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge David Hittner in Houston. She was the third-highest- ranking executive in the financial services firm Texas financier R. Allen Stanford built on what the U.S. said was a fraud based on bogus offshore bank certificates.
