Madoff hauled off to jail

AFP:

Wall Street conman Bernard Madoff was led handcuffed to jail Thursday after pleading guilty to tricking thousands of people out of billions of dollars in one of history's biggest financial scams.

Madoff, 70, told a packed New York court he was "deeply sorry and ashamed" for the decades-long Ponzi scheme, and the former financial titan and chairman of the Nasdaq stock market now looks likely to die behind bars.

He faces a maximum sentence on June 16 of 150 years after pleading guilty to all 11 counts of fraud, perjury and theft. Prosecutors also want to track down an astounding 177 billion dollars they say passed through Madoff's hands.

Judge Denny Chin asked Madoff, wearing a grey suit, dark tie and white shirt, how he would plead.

"Guilty," Madoff replied.

Defence lawyers said the silver-haired money manager should be allowed to remain free on bail in his seven-million-dollar Manhattan apartment until sentencing.

But Chin responded: "It is my intention to remand Mr Madoff" triggering applause from victims who had gathered in the court room.

...

It is hard to imagine why Chin would delay sending the guy to jail. Madoff has no hope of making restitution which would be his only hope for avoiding jail. At this point even a 15 year sentence would be a life sentence for a guy like him. The government has been able to find only a billion in assets from the over $68 billion he took in. Of course much of what he took in went right back out in the form of bogus interest and dividend payments. The victims will probably have to subtract those payments from their potential deductions for losses on their taxes. However, many of the entities who invested with him were tax exempt already so they will not get any benefit from a deductio.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more