One interview saw him crying and threatening to punch the interviewer to the poignant strains of piped Billie Holiday, while another saw him wearing what looked like liquid eyeliner. Papers linking him to a Mexican drug cartel were found in his private jet, he’s not denying suggestions that he worked for the CIA, and bathroom tiles appeared with his face on. It’s like Geoffrey Boycott’s most troubled fever dreams made manifest.

And now it’s getting krazier! After much dilly-dallying Stanford was finally indicted, and subsequently refused bail – he could be in jail for as long as a year before his trial. As the court gets its shit together, court documents are being filed, and some reveal that Stanford courted the Libyan government for investment! And that they went for it, giving him at least $500m!

Stanford went to Tripoli in January this year for a couple of days, to meet the CEO of the Libyan Investment Authority; this followed meetings with Abdulhafid Zlitni, secretary of planning in the Libyan government, last October. The form of the investment isn’t known, but if they put it in Stanford International Bank, the bank at the centre of the fraud allegations, then they can expect to get back “cents in the dollar”, if they’re lucky.

Start sharpening those conspiracy theories. I know Libya’s getting all legit recently, with their burgeoning tourist industry and only halfway provocative meetings with former enemies, but their legacy as anti-American terrorists who tried to kill Marty McFly still weighs heavy in the mind. Stanford? CIA? Libya? Investment? Fraud? Bathroom tiles? Let’s link it all up and say that Stanford was paid by the CIA to extract money from Libya and then flush it away, thereby preventing its rise from anything but a disenfranchised, boycott-ridden Islamic state. I’ve said it, now run with it, internet crazies!

He’s had to endure the sight of less sub-primed competitors like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan announcing fabulous profits last week; Citi did post a $1.6bn profit, but this figure was buoyed by a weird accounting rule that debt declining in value must be valued at market rates, leading to an artificially inflated earnings figure; it also got bolstered by selling off units, 22 of which have gone since the crisis began. There were still $7.3bn of absorbed bad assets last quarter bringing the total since the crisis began to $39bn, and with unemployment as it is, that’s only going to continue.

But despite this, all the banks’ incumbent directors got re-elected, including Pandit, who said: “I intend to see this through because there is not more important place to be than Citi”. Fair enough maybe, as Pandit is a relative newcomer and recently bought 850,000 shares in the bank as a show of solidarity, but why on earth have shareholders re-elected auditors like John Deutch (pictured above with the word “catastrophe” looming behind him), Alain Belda, and C. Michael Armstrong, who in the Charles Prince era all oversaw Citi’s purchase of the CDOs that ended up crippling the bank?

Deutch is a chemist by trade, who was refused ongoing access to top secret documents when he was head of the CIA after he left them on his home computer – not exactly screaming “prudence” or “diligence” is it? And why has a chemist been given auditing responsibilities at director level of Citigroup anyway? Meanwhile Armstrong is the bozo who mismanaged AT&T’s expansion into cable and broadband, prompting the company, saddled with $60bn debt, to sell off its newfound assets at a loss. And the lead director, Alain Belda, is the former head of Alcoa who managed to lose Alcan to Rio Tinto last year; he’s still on the board at Alcoa, and given the current plight of the company, will he see his Citi position as anything but an extra title and income?

Do the shareholders actually ever want to see a dividend again? Because by re-electing these dinosaurs (Belda’s 65, the others over 70) who don’t know an SIV from an SUV, that’s not what’s going to happen. Plus Citi are still paying directors who have left, but are trying to show restraint by not providing coffee and doughnuts. Did everyone have a bowl of crazy for breakfast yesterday?

There were some vocally pissed-off shareholders to be fair. “If we had the right to vote for somebody else, anybody else, I don’t care even if it was Bernie Madoff, he’d do a better job than the current board”, said one; “thank God you’re gone”, shouted another at the departing board members. But for every angry shareholder, there were two more ready to ignore the professional advice and mumble something about stability and allowing the status quo to go unchallenged. Well, it’s your funeral!

“Waterboarding” is a euphemistic term that allows a violent form of torture to sound merely like your gran describing surfing. It involves restraining someone with their head lower than their feet, and pouring water over their sack-covered face – the result is your nose and mouth fill with water and you feel like you’re drowning; Time ran a feature this week on the long-term psychological damage caused by the technique. It’s also emerged in the last couple of days that the CIA used the technique 266 times on two Al-Qaeda prisoners, which won’t please the anti-Guantanamo Obama; two officials in the human rights bit of the Justice Department under George Bush say that leaked memos prove there was no “torture”. This one will run and run.

Anyway, to understand the bewilderment and horror of interrogation by your off-the-leash enemies, or maybe just to have something to high-five people about, Playboy journalist Mike Guy signed up for some waterboarding action this week. He reckons he can do at least 15 seconds. He does about 5. Lame:

More hardcore is Christopher Hitchens, who goes back for more after his first go, though not without psychological cost: “I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia…if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.” We’re unsure what’s worse – the waterboarding, or the terrible trip-hop they seem to have piped into the torture room:

But the hardest of them all is Kaj Larsen, who back in 2007 not only dons the regulation orange Guantanamo boiler suit and shackles, but gets waterboarded over and over for 24 minutes. “That sucked”, was his conclusion after the session ended:

We’re now just waiting for the Jackass or Dirty Sanchez brigades to try it out for some ill-advised political special…