By Susannah Nesmith and Andrew M. Harris 

MIAMI, USA (Bloomberg) -- Two former Stanford Financial Group Co. employees lost a mid-trial bid to dismiss charges that they illegally shredded records wanted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a probe of financier Allen Stanford.

US District Judge Richard W. Goldberg in Miami refused Tuesday to throw out the case after hearing arguments. Goldberg questioned prosecutors’ ability to prove intent, calling their evidence “precious thin,” and said he would allow the defense to renew its request later in the case.

Bruce Perraud and Thomas Raffanello have been on trial since Feb. 1. As prosecutors rested their case yesterday, attorneys for the Stanford workers argued the US failed to prove they acted criminally, according to a court filing.

“There’s no evidence of corrupt intent,” Raffanello attorney Kendall Coffey, a former US Attorney for Miami, told Goldberg Tuesday, arguing on behalf of both defendants. “It’s time for this case to end now.”

Stanford was sued by the SEC and later indicted for allegedly leading a $7 billion fraud scheme centered on the sale of certificates of deposit through his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank Ltd. He has denied those allegations.

Raffanello and Perraud both worked in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, office of Houston-based Stanford Financial Group. Raffanello, who was Stanford’s global director of security, is a former head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Miami office. Perraud was a global security specialist for Stanford.

They are the first defendants to face trial on charges related to the Stanford investment fraud scandal and face as long as 40 years in prison if convicted on all four counts against them.

The prosecution argued that Raffanello and Perraud had shredded documents wanted by the SEC even though they’d been told the SEC had obtained a court order directing their preservation, according to government papers filed yesterday.

Assistant US Attorney Jack Patrick returned to that theme today as he argued against dismissal of the case.

“They were destroying records and documents, which is the one thing all these e-mails and orders told them not to do,” he told the judge. “We’ll never know what documents were destroyed,” Patrick said.

“Well, you’ll never know because you haven’t bothered to look,” Goldberg replied.

SEC attorney Michael King Monday told the court his agency only recently started to review papers recovered from the Fort Lauderdale office of Stanford Financial because of a mistaken belief that all of the records kept there had been destroyed. The SEC hasn’t examined electronic data recovered stored at the Fort Lauderdale office, King said.

Raffanello’s lawyers had said in court papers that the Fort Lauderdale Stanford office was “paperless,” and that copies of its paper records were stored on the office’s computers, according to their court filing.

After Goldberg refused to throw out the case, Raffanello’s lawyers Tuesday presented the testimony of former Miami US Attorney Guy Lewis, who told the jury Raffanello is a “good man” with an “excellent” reputation.

Lewis said he first met Raffanello during the prosecution of former Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega, while Raffanello was supervisor for a team of DEA agents.

Raffanello’s lawyer, Richard Sharpstein, also showed the jury copies of three checks showing his client had invested $374,000 in Stanford-issued securities.

During his opening statement last week, Sharpstein told the jury his client was a victim of the alleged Stanford fraud.

Stanford’s criminal defense lawyer, Kent Schaffer, was in the Miami courtroom Tuesday watching the arguments over whether to dismiss the shredding case.

Goldberg told jurors they will hear closing arguments Wednesday.