Ruling party stays in power.

Antigua's ruling party will stay in power, but with a narrower margin in parliament, following an election shadowed by US fraud allegations against R. Allen Stanford, reports AP (March 13, 2009):

The United Progressive Party won 9 of 17 seats in the parliament, enough to keep Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer in his post. Before the election, Spencer's party had 12 seats. Its main rival, the Antigua Labor Party, won 7 seats in the vote. Results were delayed by a down-to-the-wire race between Errol Cort, the country's finance minister, and Lester Bird, the former prime minister who helped Stanford establish his business empire here. Cort, who won the seat by less than 100 votes, also has ties to Stanford: His law firm represented the businessman, who has US and Antiguan citizenship, though Cort has said that he had no personal involvement with the billionaire while he served in government;

The country has been struggling in recent weeks to deal with the fallout of US allegations that Stanford operated a massive Ponzi scheme through his Antiguan-based offshore bank. Spencer's government has seized some of Stanford's assets in hopes of keeping the businesses operating and prevent them from being seized to compensate investors.