Billions of dollars were pulled out of Bernard Madoff’s accounts in the months leading up to his arrest, according to an analysis of his business records by The New York Times.
About $12 billion was withdrawn from the accounts of his firm in 2008, and another $6 billion was taken out just three months before the disgraced financier was charged with orchestrating a global multibillion-dollar swindle scheme, the documents show.
The news could mean that the thousands of investors he allegedly bilked around the world might have hope of seeing some of their lost money again.
The court-appointed trustee handling the Madoff bankruptcy case, Irving H. Picard or Baker & Hostetler, filed two lawsuits Tuesday for the return of $6.1 billion withdrawn in the last 10 years — which Picard was able to do under federal law.
The suits, filed in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, claim that the investors who withdrew the funds should have known the profits were too exorbitant to be legal.
According to people familiar with the analysis of Mr. Madoff’s cash records, most of the $12 billion that flowed out of his fraudulent money-management operation last year was withdrawn by various “feeder funds,” which had raised cash from investors and pooled it to invest with Mr. Madoff.
Several of those feeder funds have already been the targets of lawsuits by Mr. Picard, who is searching for assets to be shared among customers who lost what they believed to be almost $65 billion in the Ponzi scheme.
It is not clear where the cash taken out of the Madoff accounts is located, or how much of it can be recovered through litigation.
(Source: NY Times / Fox News)
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5 Responses
and you thought he was going to hand over his checkbook to the Justice Department?????????
If no money was actually invested by Bernie, none did get lost either.
This Madoff Scheme could turn out to be a real savior for all those who lost money in stocks.
Kiddush for Bernie !(Seudas Hodo’oh, kind off)
#2 – Just b/c Madoff didn’t invest the money, doesn’t meant that it is still around. He spent it! (atleast a lot of it!)
#3 – How many billions can a human being spend in his lifetime ???
There is a lot of lifetimes in 50 B’s.
#3, the money is used o pay profits to the investors and to keep bringing new investors in. That is the basic foundation of every ponzzi scheme! It takes huge dollars to pay big profits to what I imagine must be well over 100 billion dollars invested over time!