London, Feb 22 : The sight of hundreds of Antiguans desperate to recover their life savings from the bank of disgraced cricket billionaire Sir Allen Stanford will always haunt Kevin Pietersen.

England's superstar batsman was playing inside the St John's Recreation Ground as the fallout from the collapse of the alleged fraudster's business empire began, News of the World reported.

Stanford, America's 205th richest man, has sullied the whole of cricket after he was charged with serial fraud.

US investigators have accused him of a "massive ongoing fraud" which milked 50,000 investors in 131 countries of 6.6 billion pound.

"I feel sorry for anybody who has lost their money in things like this in the current recession. I know people who have lost in bank schemes and this is another one of those. I felt desperately sorry for all of those who were queuing up in the street in St John's to try to get their life savings out," Pietersen said.

KP signed a personal deal with Stanford to promote the farcical $20m winner-takes-all game last November.

But he blasted: "Stanford was a sleazebag. I was very uncomfortable with the whole Stanford thing.

"It was not that I was captain at the time, it was the uncomfortable situation of everybody thinking the England team had been sold. With the financial state of the world, people were talking about money instead of cricket. Those kind of things just didn't seem right to me, so it's not a bad thing we are not going to have that tournament any more."

Pietersen was hired along with West Indies captain Chris Gayle to be the face of Stanford's Twenty20 extravaganza. (ANI)