Madoff

Over the past few weeks, we have listed and explained the Top 10 Financial Fraud Law issues of the year. The winners (so to speak) range from Bernard Madoff (still of concern three years after his fall), insider trading, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, mortgage foreclosures, and the use of federal and state prosecutors to attack financial fraud. 

Yet another longtime employee of Bernard Madoff has pleaded guilty to participating in the greatest Ponzi scheme of all time, indicating that the scheme began in the late 1990s. 

It’s been a long time coming, but it looks like Madoff claimants and the U.S. Postal Service both will get a bit of a boost now that Madoff liquidation trustee Irving Picard is going to begin mailing out an initial interim pro rata distribution of about $312 million. 

Boyd M. Johnson III, current Deputy US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), will join the law firm of WilmerHale on October 1.

Many years after Harry Markopolos first tried to blow the whistle on Bernard Madoff, years after Madoff’s Ponzi scheme first became public, and a while after Markopolos published his book about Madoff and the SEC, a movie

The question of whether the SEC improperly destroyed Madoff documents, and other investigative documents, is not going to simply go away. Now, the National Archives has stepped in with a statement. 

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to account for "serious allegations" that case-related document destruction might have compromised enforcement in cases involving suspicious activity at major banks and hedge funds. 

Orlan Johnson, board chairman of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (“SIPC”), which maintains a special reserve fund authorized by Congress to help investors at failed brokerage firms, issued the following statement today: 

The unanimous decision by a three judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upholding Madoff trustee Irving Picard’s interpretation of “net equity” is going to have significant implications for investors – including the Wilpon family – who lost money in the Madoff Ponzi scheme. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has affirmed a bankruptcy court decision that upheld Madoff trustee Irving Picard’s determination as to how to calculate “net equity” was “legally sound.”