HOUSTON (Bloomberg) R. Allen Stanford’s defence experts were ordered to keep preparing for the former financier’s trial over an alleged $7 billion investment fraud by a U.S. appellate court that also agreed to pay their back wages.All of Stanford’s non-attorney experts quit last week after appellate judges controlling the former billionaire’s taxpayer- funded defence budget said they would limit and withhold the experts’ compensation until after conclusion of his trial, set to begin January 23 in Houston federal court.“It would be neither feasible nor economical to obtain a replacement to perform the services Marcum was expected by counsel to provide,” Circuit Judge Edith Jones, the chief of the US Court of Appeals in New Orleans, said in a letter yesterday to Marcum LLP, one of the expert contractors that resigned last week from Stanford’s defence team.The service providers were also “ordered to continue work on the case as previously planned, including the provision of testifying experts, through the end of trial, and, if required by counsel, through the conclusion of the case in the district court,” Jones said in the letter, which was posted to the court’s electronic docket. Jones issued similar orders and agreements to pay overdue invoices to two other expert-services contractors to keep them working on Stanford’s defence.Accumyn Consulting and the Worley Group had also resigned last week over non-payment of bills dating back to September, according to court filings.Ali Fazel, Stanford’s lead criminal-defence attorney, asked US District Judge David Hittner last week to delay Stanford’s trial for three months to allow more preparation time. Fazel argued that Stanford has had too little time since being declared mentally competent to adequately review documents critical to his defence.Fazel said the defence was hampered by the resignation of all expert-services contractors on December 30, after the appellate court balked at paying their bills. Jones, in her letters yesterday, said billings by Marcum and Accumyn feature “hourly rates significantly in excess of the rates payable under the Criminal Justice Act to even the most experienced attorneys.”Jones said the court would “consider” future payments for work by Accumyn and Marcum according to a sliding schedule pegged to the beginning and end of Stanford’s criminal trial, as well as any post-trial work the firms provide. Jones didn’t require withholding for work she ordered the Worley Group to provide.Stanford, 61, has been in custody as a flight risk since he was indicted in June 2009 on charges of defrauding investors through allegedly bogus certificates of deposit at his Antigua- based Stanford International Bank.He denies any wrongdoing.Stanford was declared mentally fit for trial on December 22, after completing eight months of rehabilitation at the federal prison hospital in Butner, North Carolina.Hittner found the former financier had sufficiently recovered to understand the proceedings and assist with his defence after suffering head injuries in a September 2009 jailhouse assault and becoming addicted to anxiety drugs prescribed by prison doctors following the attack .Hittner appointed taxpayer-funded defence attorneys for Stanford in 2010 after he found the former billionaire to be indigent.Stanford, who was ranked the 205th richest person in the US in 2008 by Forbes magazine, is accused by the government of skimming more than $1 billion in investor funds to finance a lavish lifestyle of private jets, yachts and a Caribbean island.