Financier Bernard Madoff leaves Manhattan Federal court docket March 10, 2009 in New York City. Madoff attended a listening to relating to the conflicting standing of his authorized illustration in his multi-billion greenback fraud allegations.
Chris Hondros | Getty Images
The tenth and last distribution from a fund for victims of the late Ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff started Monday, the Department of Justice mentioned.
The final disbursement, of greater than $131 million, is being despatched to greater than 23,000 victims worldwide. When it’s accomplished, greater than $4.3 billion may have been distributed by the fund to greater than 40,000 victims in almost 130 nations, the DOJ mentioned.
That tally is sort of 94% of the estimated whole losses from the rip-off, the division mentioned.
The last disbursement by the Madoff Victim Fund was introduced roughly 16 years after Madoff’s fraud got here to mild.
“Today’s distribution represents an unprecedented conclusion of sufferer compensation from civil forfeiture actions associated to the Madoff scheme,” mentioned James Dennehy, FBI New York Field Office assistant director in cost.
“These victims implicitly trusted Madoff with their investments solely to in the end lose important monies to his egocentric plan,” Dennehy mentioned.
Madoff, who was head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded responsible in March 2009 to 11 felonies associated to what federal prosecutors have mentioned was the most important Ponzi scheme on the planet.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in jail for the fraud, which spanned 4 many years and concerned him paying off prospects with cash raised from different prospects, not with funding buying and selling positive aspects as he claimed.
He died in April 2021, at age 82, at a federal jail facility in North Carolina, almost a yr after he was denied a request for compassionate launch because of a terminal kidney illness.
When Madoff’s fraud first grew to become publicly recognized, prosecutors estimated the overall loss at $65 billion. But that estimate sharply dropped as soon as authorities subtracted the quantity of phantom funding positive aspects and curiosity that Madoff’s prospects have been duped into believing existed.
The largest portion of the fund for Madoff’s victims, about $2.2 billion, got here from a civil forfeiture restoration from the property of Jeffry Picower, a now-dead Madoff investor, the DOJ mentioned.
Another $1.7 billion got here from JPMorgan Chase as a part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ in January 2014. JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor establishments had served as the first financial institution by means of which Madoff operated his scheme, the DOJ has beforehand mentioned.
The remainder of the victims fund got here from a “civil forfeiture motion towards investor Carl Shapiro and his household and from civil and felony forfeiture actions towards Bernard L. Madoff, Peter B. Madoff, and their co-conspirators,” the DOJ mentioned Monday.
