BATON ROUGE - The attorney who was on the losing end of a major trial involving hundreds of victims of a Ponzi scheme is speaking out on what went wrong. It involved Baton Rouge based Stanford Trust and on Friday a jury ruled that the Louisiana Office of Financial Institutions (OFI) will not be held liable for not helping to protect residents. 

Attorney Phillip Preis has been representing around 900 people, fighting to get the money that was taken from them for the last 15 years. In a release on Sunday, Preis says "the system has once again failed them." He said they gave the state commission documents that showed the banks were alerted that the transactions weren't safe in 2004, but the public was not. 

"It made no sense to me that all of a sudden you could have a situation where unsophisticated people like the Exxon retirees that lived in Baker, Zachary and Central could invest in them but on the other hand banks in this state could not invest in them, that made absolutely no sense," Preis said.

Preis said he focused his case on what the state office of financial institutions "didn't do" to protect the public. He said the OFI focused their defense on the argument that they were not reckless for  not discovering the Stanford Ponzi scheme.

"We know that they had signals during 2001 to 2005 and never did anything about it and that's what our case was about," Preis said. "During the course of the trial they came up with some wild explanations and the whole fact of the matter is that when John Ducrest hit stand again in their portion of the case he all of a sudden had renewed memory of what happened 20 years ago."

Preis expressed his disappointment in the jury, saying they took the easy route, and it appears they had no sympathy for the victims.

"This portion of the case did not determine damages and they were smart enough to know that they were going to have to come back for another two weeks to determine damages so I think they essentially said we've had enough we're going to say we're going home and they went home."

Preis said that he won’t give up on the case and will determine if an appeal should be filed.

"I am committed to seeing it through, and when they put that casket lid on my grave you're going to know that I'm not caring about it anymore but until then I am," Preis said.