HOUSTON (Reuters) - The receiver in charge of accused swindler Allen Stanford's estate sued to recover $1.6 million in contributions made to the national campaign arms of the US Republican and Democratic parties.

The contributions made by Stanford, his firm and his former chief financial officer James Davis can be traced to an alleged $7 billion Ponzi scheme and should be returned to investors, lawyers for Ralph Janvey said in the lawsuit filed last Friday.

The groups "have no legitimate right to retain the funds, and the Receiver is entitled to the return of the funds for the benefit of claimants injured by the fraud", Janvey's attorneys said in a statement yesterday.

Janvey has twice asked the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee to return the funds and was ignored, the court papers said.

Representatives for those fund-raising arms could not immediately be reached for comment or did not have an immediate comment. Stanford, his employees and his firms spent $4.8 million during the past decade on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive politics, a private group that tracks money and politics in the nation's capital.

And after the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against Stanford in February 2009, a number of politicians including US President Barack Obama and Charles Rangel, chairman of the tax-writing committee in the US House of Representatives vowed to donate the donations to charity.