From the boardroom to the courtroom

Once the lucrative future of English cricket, Sir Allen Stanford faces disgrace after being charged with running an $8bn (£5.6bn) fraud. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the Texan-born billionaire and his close staff of misleading investors and falsely claiming their money was safely invested and delivering healthy returns. Some analysts had started questioning how Stanford International Bank had managed to consistently perform well through the financial crisis Photograph: Tom Shaw/Getty

Bernard Madoff is on bail in New York after being charged with running a $50bn Ponzi scheme. Many tens of thousands of investors face losing their savings, including Lady Victoria de Rothschild, some of the Kissinger family and US senator Frank Lautenberg. In the aftermath of Madoff's arrest, it now appears that some Wall Street executives doubted that he was operating legitimately several years ago. Photograph: Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images

Arthur Nadel sparked a two-week manhunt following allegations that hundreds of millions of dollars had vanished from his fund management firm. After turning himself in, he is in jail awaiting a bail hearing on a number of securities and wire fraud charges. Court papers show that he has dubbed himself a 'Mini-Madoff' Photograph: Pinellas County Sheriff's Office/AP

Jérôme Kerviel, the French rogue trader, was charged in January 2008 following allegations that his employer Société Générale had lost almost €5bn. Kerviel has been accused of conducting massive, unauthorised trades that were hidden from his employer. His lawyers say they will prove that SocGen was well aware of what he was doing. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

Ralph Cioffi had a rude awakening last June, when FBI officials arrested the Bear Stearns executive and his colleague Matthew Tannin, in dawn raids at their homes in New Jersey and New York. They swiftly appeared in court to face charges that they had lied to investors to persuade them to keep putting money into two hedge funds which later collapsed. Cioffi was also accused of insider trading, having allegedly taken his own money out of the funds, which invested in US mortgages Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty

Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi are waiting for their cases to proceed, amid reports that the Department of Justice is being stretched by the growing number of prosecutions for alleged white-collar crime Photograph: Louis Lanzano/AP

Ramalinga Raju, the Indian software tycoon, is accused of the biggest corporate fraud in the country's history. Having founded Satyam and turned it into one of India's biggest IT firms, he confessed in January that the company's financial results were fraudulent. He is in custody, having been refused bail, while the authorities probe his admission that he falsely inflated Satyam's cash reserves by $1bn Photograph: Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images

Marcus Schrenker apparently tried to fake his own death in a plane crash. Prosecutors say the financial manager took to the skies and put his plane on autopilot before parachuting to the ground in an attempt to escape court action brought by several investors. He is now also charged with the illegal destruction of a plane Photograph: AP