A US federal bankruptcy judge ruled on Tuesday that thousands of clients of funds that invested money with fraudulent financier Bernard Madoff do not qualify for payouts aimed at reimbursing Madoff’s customers because the clients did not hold accounts in their names and they gave control over their investments to the managers of the funds.
The ruling by US Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland means the investors cannot recover up to US$500,000 from a fund created to reimburse small investors who are victims of fraudulent schemes. Lifland said that the customers entrusted no cash or securities with Madoff, received no account statements or other communications from him and had no transactions reflected on Madoff’s books.
The ruling came in a case brought on behalf of 16 feeder funds or hedge funds that invested with Madoff through at least 19 separate accounts. This, though, was only a small subsection of all the feeder funds that invested with Madoff before his private investment company collapsed with his arrest in December 2008.
The ruling by the Manhattan jurist was consistent with the findings of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Securities Investor Protection Corp. A court-appointed trustee has denied two-thirds of more than 16,000 claims on the grounds that they were filed by individuals who did not have direct accounts with Madoff.
Madoff is serving a 150-year prison sentence after admitting that he cheated thousands of investors out of about US$20 billion they had invested. Just before the two-decade fraud was exposed, Madoff informed the investors in statements that their original investments were worth more than US$65 billion. In fact, only a few hundred million dollars remained.
Meanwhile, Madoff on Tuesday said the judge in his case had made him a “human pinata” and passed an overly harsh sentence.
Judge Denny Chin sentenced the one-time Wall Street icon to 150 years behind bars in 2009 after he was found guilty of defrauding investors — ranging from celebrities to well-known banks and Jewish charities — of billions of dollars.
Prosecutors say about US$13 billion was handed to Madoff. The financier himself has talked about losing US$50 billion, which is believed to be the amount that would have been paid out had the funds been properly invested.
Madoff told the Times he had been made a scapegoat for the financial crisis that eventually laid bare his scheme, saying Chin had made him “the human pinata of Wall Street.”
“In my mind, Chin was anything but fair, with zero understanding of the industry,” Madoff said. “Explain to me who else has received a sentence like that ... I mean, serial killers get a death sentence, but that’s virtually what he gave me.”
“I’m surprised Chin didn’t suggest stoning in the public square,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema