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Bernie Madoff trustee ups claim against investor Jeffry Picower to return $7.2B

Thomas Frommherz — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:38:28 +0000

The man tasked with recovering Bernard Madoff’s assets wants a Florida investor to return the $7.2 billion in profits he earned from the convicted Ponzi schemer over 30 years.

Longtime Madoff investor Jeffry Picower was the biggest beneficiary of Madoff’s $65 billion scam, trustee Irving Picard said in court papers filed on Thursday.

Picower, his wife, and their associates should have known the returns they got from Madoff – some as high as 950% – were ill-gotten, Picard contends.

Picower received more than $2.4 billion during the past six years alone, and his accounts “were riddled with blatant and obvious fraud,” Picard wrote.

Picower says the numbers are wrong and that he’s a victim just like many other Madoff investors, not a beneficiary. He has filed papers to dismiss the suit, Samuel Goldsmith wrote.

Picower, of Palm Beach, Florida, was listed 371st and worth $1 billion on the Forbes list published this week.

He started out as an accountant and lawyer and then made money investing in the medical sector. He and his wife Barbara were friends of Madoff and his wife Ruth.

They headed a philanthropy, the Picower Foundation. The foundation closed when the Madoff fraud unraveled last December.

A spokeswoman for the Picowers attorney, William Zabel, said Picard “continues to make false and outrageous claims … based on a misreading of the purported ‘facts’.”

She said the Picowers initiated discussions to reach a settlement with the trustee, who is winding down Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Picower’s lawyers repeatedly said the investor was a “victim” of the fraud.

Madoff, 71, is serving a 150-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in March to the fraud. Prosecutors have said Madoff bilked investors around the world out of as much as $64.8 billion.

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Madoff wife Ruth Withdrew $15M Before His Arrest!

Amarendra Bhushan — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:56:50 +0000

Ruth Madoff, the wife of disgraced money manager Bernard Madoff withdrew more than $15 million from a firm co-owned by her husband — including $10 million on the day before his arrest on charges he ran a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Ruth Madoff, 67, withdrew $5.5 million on Nov. 25 and $10 million on Dec. 10 from Cohmad Securities Corp., a New York firm co-owned by her husband.

Madoff is free on a $10 million bond but confined to his Manhattan apartment. A source close to the case said the deadline for prosecutors to seek an indictment against the trader would be extended 30 days, the second such extension. Ruth Madoff, the co-author of a kosher cookbook, has drawn scrutiny from federal prosecutors who had tried unsuccessfully to have her husband’s bail revoked and jail him immediately. They said that the couple sent more than $1 million worth of valuables to relatives and friends in violation of a court order.

The victims identified so far have included ordinary people and Hollywood celebrities, along with large hedge funds, international banks and charities in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Madoff was arrested after investigators said he confessed to his sons that he had swindled investors of a mammoth Ponzi scheme — early investors are paid with money raised from new investors.

The 70-year-old former Nasdaq stock market chairman remains confined to his Manhattan penthouse under house arrest.

Galvin made his disclosure in a complaint asking Massachusetts state regulators to stop Cohmad from doing business in Massachusetts because it failed to provide information to Galvin about its relationship with Madoff. Galvin said Cohmad officials have ignored subpoenas or given incomplete responses as part of the state’s probe of how Massachusetts investors lost money in the Madoff scheme.

An associate of Madoff, Robert Jaffe, appeared last week before officers of the Massachusetts Security Division, but officials declined to say what Jaffe discussed. Galvin has described Jaffe as a registered agent and principal of Cohmad, which is in the same New York City building as Madoff’s firm.

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What is Santander’s Madoff payout?

Amarendra Bhushan — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 11:13:49 +0000

The people responsible for Santander’s Madoff strategy are not even at Santander anymore. They left a few months before the scandal broke.

Santander announced last week it would compensate all individual clients who invested in the Optimal Strategic U.S. Equity Fund through the issue of 1.38 billion euros ($1.77 billion) in preferential shares with an annual coupon of 2 percent.

- Investors who bought products sold by Santander’s Madoff-hit unit Optimal, have asked a U.S. judge to halt the bank’s plan to compensate investors with new shares.

- Santander had launched a campaign that was “coercive and deceitful, that intended to pressure those affected to withdraw their suits one by one.

- Investors had served papers in a South Florida court demanding the issue of shares be stopped until the question of whether Santander shared some responsibility for the alleged fraud had been settled.

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