On Friday, R. Allen Stanford asked a federal judge to order insurance companies that issued directors-and-officers policies covering him to approve “lawyers of my choice” and to pay them. Stanford told U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas of the Southern District of Texas in the Friday letter that, because she signed a May 18 order allowing Visser Shidlofsky partner Lee H. Shidlofsky and associates Alan M. Cohen and Douglas P. Skelley, all of Austin, to withdraw as his attorneys in a coverage suit, he must represent himself pro se in that civil litigation.
“I have no choice but to respectfully request your immediate and emergent intervention to order the Underwriters to approve and compensate my criminal attorneys and coverage attorneys of my choice,” wrote the jailed Houston businessman. (These aren’t the first lawyers to depart from Stanford’s cases.)
