Bernard Madoff urges investigators to keep pursuing big banks
Imprisoned money manager Bernard Madoff is encouraging those investigating his massive Ponzi scheme to keep going after banks he alleges were complicit in the fraud.
Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence for defrauding investors out of billions of dollars, wrote an email to Fox Business Network reiterating what he has said before: The big banks he dealt with had to be aware of the scheme.
“The banks had to know what I was doing regarding the fraud,” he wrote.
That echoed what Madoff told the New York Times during an interview from prison in 2011. He said then that the banks “had to know.”
“But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know,” he said at the time.
In his latest email, Madoff also pointed the finger at feeder funds, which recruited investors whose money was later invested without their knowledge into his Ponzi scheme. He asked investigators to look into whether any funds gave loans to family members.
His email came on the same day an appeals court ruled that indirect investors -- or people whose money was unwittingly invested by others into Madoff’s fraud -- are not entitled to recover their losses.
Bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard has so far recovered about $9.3 billion and is expected to have returned about $5.4 billion of that to direct investors by March.
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