Venezuela has moved to seize a bank owned by Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire and cricket promoter charged with defrauding investors worldwide.

Venezuela's Finance Minister, Ali Rodriguez, said that the decision to take over the Stanford Bank, which has 15 branches in the country, was taken to calm anxious clients, who made massive withdrawals in the hours leading up to the decision.

On Tuesday the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed civil charges against Mr Stanford, 58, for what they called a "massive, ongoing fraud" involving $9.2 billion in securities.

Allen Stanford's is the most high profile alleged fraud scheme since the SEC charged Bernard Madoff, the Wall Street financier, with carrying out a $50 billion Ponzi scheme in December. Mr Stanford’s wealth management and financial services group has offices across North America, Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean.

The tycoon's companies include the Antiguan-based Stanford International Bank (SIB); the Stanford Group Company (SGC), a broker-dealer and investment adviser based in Houston, Texas; and the investment adviser Stanford Capital Management.

The SEC also linked Mr Stanford to an additional scheme relating to $1.2 billion in sales by SGC advisers of a mutual fund program, called Stanford Allocation Strategy (SAS), by using “materially false” data.

Mr Stanford's organisation has also run into problems in Mexico, where the banking regulator is also investigating a local Stanford bank branch for possible violation of banking laws, an official at the financial industry watchdog said on Thursday.

The CNBV regulator is looking into whether the Mexican unit Stanford Fondos broke laws on investing abroad, Carlos Lopez-Moctezuma, a senior official, told Reuters.

Mexican financial laws forbid Mexican banks to encourage clients to invest in unauthorized certificates of deposits abroad