(Bloomberg) — Lord Conrad Black, in prison for fraud and obstruction of justice, still has his peerage, as does Jeffrey Archer, who served two years for perjury.

Until last June, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe could claim his honorary knighthood too.

For now, R. Allen Stanford is still Sir Allen.

The honours system invented by the British and embraced by Antigua and Barbuda sets a high bar for stripping a person of a title.

Stanford, a Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of the Nation of Antigua and Barbuda, is well within his rights to carry on as "sir" even as he stands accused of running an $8 billion Ponzi scheme, said Maurice Merchant, a spokesman for the government of Antigua and Barbuda.

"Until a conclusion of the US investigations and charges lead to a conviction, we would not act upon the accusations," Merchant said in an e-mail.

Stanford was gonged, as a knighting is called in some non- aristocratic circles, in a 2006 ceremony attended by Prince Edward, according to Stanford's web site. The fifth-generation Texan was the 15th member of the order, founded in 1998.

In Britain, where 661 years of the Orders of Chivalry were the model for the East Caribbean country, it takes a conviction, treason or worse to have one's knighthood taken away, said Charles Kidd, editor of Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage, a reference book of aristocratic genealogy that has been published since 1769. "It's very rare for titles to be removed," Kidd said.

He had not heard of Stanford, best known in the for his sponsorship of the 20 over game international cricket, until news broke about his alleged fraud, Kidd said. "I didn't give him much thought."

Mugabe's knighthood was annulled "as a mark of revulsion at the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process over which he has presided," the UK Foreign Office said at the time.

Mugabe was the last knight to be deprived by the monarch. Now, 888 people have signed a petition on the online facility provided by the office of Prime Minister Gordon Brown demanding that the next be Fred Goodwin, who was knighted in 2004 for "services to banking" and quit last year as chief executive officer of Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc. The biggest UK-controlled bank's losses in 2008 totalled £24.1 billion ($34.2 billion), the most in British corporate history.

Goodwin's honour was "premature," the petition says. "It is completely inappropriate that he should be allowed to retain this elevated status."

For a lord or lady to lose a peerage requires an act of Parliament. That hasn't happened since 1917, when the dukes of Albany and Cumberland forfeited their titles for their allegiance to Germany in Second World War.

Black, convicted in 2007 of directing a $6.1 million fraud while CEO of Chicago-based Hollinger International Inc., renounced his Canadian citizenship to become Lord Black of Crossharbour in 2001 and join the House of Lords.

Members of the 700-year-old upper house of Parliament may either inherit or receive their titles by appointment.

Black may reclaim his House seat after he leaves prison. While Archer, released six years ago, has the same right, he hasn't made an appearance in the chamber, saying in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. in 2006 that he had quit politics to concentrate on writing.

A lord since 1992, Archer was convicted in 2001 of perjury and perverting the course of justice in connection with a libel suit in which he lied about his dealings with a prostitute.

Under the UK system, only British nationals may use honorifics. So while it is Dame Judi Dench and Sir Paul McCartney, it isn't Sir Rudolph Giuliani, nor Sir Paul Hewson, though the former New York mayor and the Irish rock star better known as Bono were knighted by the queen.

Mugabe wasn't a "sir," and neither was Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose knighthood was withdrawn in 1989. Mark Thatcher, who struck a plea bargain in South Africa in 2005 over his involvement in funding an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea, is still entitled to call himself "Sir".

He inherited the baronetage awarded to his father in 1990, the year his mother was ousted a Britain's prime minister.

Stanford, who has had dual citizenship in the US and Antigua and Barbuda since 1999, was nominated by Lester Bird, a former prime minister who leads the parliamentary opposition in Antigua and Barbuda.

In the final weeks of Bird's administration in 2004, Stanford bought land, mostly around the international airport, the terms of which are disputed as by Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer's government. Stanford hasn't responded publicly to the US Securities and Exchange Commission charges. US marshals shut down the Houston office of Stanford Group Co. on February 17.

A federal judge ordered the banker to surrender his passport and refrain from travelling outside the US until the court heard the SEC's request for a preliminary injunction. Island regulators are conducting their own probe into Stanford, said Merchant, the government spokesman. "We have our concerns."