PrairiePundit

From CNN: Madoff sentenced to 150 years He deserves everyday of it and it is too bad he want live long enough to complete his sentence.

CNN: Associates of convicted Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff knew he was scamming his clients but joined in anyway because of the big money they could make, a securities investigator testified in a sworn affidavit for a Connecticut court. The testimony by investigator Edward H. Seidle on Tuesday came as a Connecticut judge froze the funds of Madoff and several of his business associates as part of a lawsuit filed for members of a city's retirement fund who say they invested with companies linked to Madoff. In his affidavit, Seidle said Madoff's associates -- specifically the so-called "feeder funds" that handled money for Fairfield, Connecticut's retirement plan -- should have known that he was cheating his clients. "It is my opinion ... that [the funds and their principals] were all aware that Bernard L. Madoff was engaging in illegal conduct in connection with his purported money management operations and intentionally chose to participate and suppor...

NY Times, Caucus Blog: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has given $100,000 in contributions from Bernard L. Madoff to victims of the disgraced financier’s Ponzi scheme, a spokesman said Thursday. Eric Schultz, the committee’s communications director, said it gave the money to Irving Picard, a trustee appointed to liquidate Mr. Madoff’s assets and process claims from Mr. Madoff’s victims. He did not specify when the committee returned the money. ... This is a smart move. It would have been smarter if they had done it sooner. Some of the others who received contributions from Madoff gave equivalent amounts to charities, but returning the money to the trustee for victims is the more appropriate response. Politicians who received donations in the Stanford scandal should also return the money to those trying to marshall the remaining assets for disposal to victims.

Washington Times: The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which received $100,000 in campaign contributions from disgraced financier Bernard Madoff , has yet to rid itself of the tainted funds that other Washington politicos have rushed to shed since the collapse of Mr. Madoff's $64 billion Ponzi scheme in December. Mr. Madoff made four separate $25,000 donations to the DSCC since 2005. The most recent donation was made in September, according to campaign finance records. The committee received the lion's share of Madoff's political contributions during that period. "We have not returned the money yet," DSCC communications director Eric Schultz told The Washington Times. ... An analysis conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics found that Madoff and his wife, Ruth, gave the bulk of their campaign contributions to Democrats. The couple donated $238,200 to federal candidates, parties and committees since 1991, and Democrats received 88 percent of t...

CBS: CBS News has learned that a second person was arrested today in connection with the Madoff scandal. Madoff's chief accountant David Friehling has been charged with filing false audits with and aiding and abetting security fraud. CBS News has learned that Friehling has surrendered to authorities and is scheduled to appear before a U.S. magistrate in federal court in Manhattan later today. Friehling was an independent accountant, and did not work at Madoff's firm. He is charged in a criminal complaint. He was allegedly the auditor that certified Madoff's annual statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ... This was a pretty obvious case and it is surprising it has taken so long to bring it. Madoff clearly could not have pulled off or sustained his fraud if an honest audit was done. Auditors are supposed to look behind the balance sheet of the company to verify both assets and liabilities. Since Madoff was generating bogus trade tickets, this should have ...

CBS: It's easy, when you're inventing investment account statements out of whole cloth, to make yourself look like a financial wizard. Or maybe it isn't. Bernard Madoff put quite a bit of work into it. What's clear from the evidence against him is that Madoff never really invested a penny of the $65 billion investors trusted to him. It's not like the guy was skimming a little off the top of his transactons. He didn't buy or sell a share of anything on his investors' behalf. He just took the money and sent back made-up statements. But like any good con artist, Madoff had to give his marks something to believe in. And he did. According to charging documents, Madoff pitched investors a strategy he called "split strike conversion" that involved investing in a basket of 35-50 stocks from the S&P 100 (the 100 largest publicly-traded companies in the United States). He promised to "opportunistically time" his purchases and he said he was p...

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 s...

From the AP: Madoff to plead guilty, could face up to 150 years The question is whether it will be in his penthouse or a real prison.

NY Times: The clients who trusted Bernard L. Madoff still do not know exactly what he did with their money. But they know what he did not do with it: He did not buy any of those blue-chip stocks and Treasury bills listed on their account statements over the last 13 years. The court-appointed trustee who is winding down Mr. Madoff’s business said on Friday that his team had searched records going back almost to 1993 and found no evidence that any securities were bought for investors during that time. That pattern probably stretches back even further, according to the trustee, Irving Picard of the law firm of Baker Hostetler. But his team, operating in a crime scene “under the watchful eyes of the F.B.I. ,” simply has not yet been able to dig back any further in the Madoff archives, he said. His report, delivered at an emotional public meeting of creditors on Friday, demolishes the theory that Mr. Madoff was an honest man driven into fraud by the relentless market strain of recent yea...

CBS: On Capitol Hill Wednesday, the financial analyst who first blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff back in 2000 went public for the first time, stunning lawmakers with the full scope of the $50 billion fraud. CBS News correspondent Armen Keteyian reports. In two hours of riveting, no-holds barred testimony , Harry Markopolos revealed the depth - and danger - of his nine-year fight to expose the Madoff scandal. Markopolos said at one point he feared for his life. "He would have known my name and, he knew he had a team tracking him. I didn't think I was long for this world," he said. One reason: Bernie Madoff was among the "most powerful men" on Wall Street. Another: In 2002 Markopolos said he discovered billions of dollars in "dirty money" was being funneled into Madoff Securities through a series of off-shore accounts. "When you're that big and that secretive, you're going to attract a lot of organized crime money, and which we ... now kno...

The NY Times reports on the loss in one of Rich's companies. The investment was made through money manager J. Ezra Merkin, who is being sued by New York University among others.

Reuters: Everyone caught up in the scandal of accused Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff wants to know where the money is. Madoff, who authorities say confessed to losing $50 billion in "a giant Ponzi scheme," has given a list of his assets, liabilities and property to U.S. regulators. But the thousands duped, from the beach cities of Florida to yacht clubs of the Mediterranean to Hollywood and Manhattan, may never see it. And judging by the scandals involving Bayou Group hedge fund, WorldCom and Adelphia Communications, any money they may see down the road will likely be a fraction of what they invested. "We have received many calls from people and everyone is saying 'where did the money go?' because he obviously didn't use it all," said Craig Stein, an attorney in Boca Raton, Florida. "If you add up all of the firms and entities and brokers that were making commissions and compensation off of the promotion or facilitat...

NY Post: Investigators believe that Bernard Madoff has stuffed hundreds of millions of dollars in Ponzi profits into offshore tax havens from which they could prove tricky to recover. In the weeks since his Dec. 11 arrest, forensic accountants have been scouring Madoff's books as federal officials ready an indictment against the hated hedge-funder, who remains under house arrest in his $7 million Upper East Side penthouse. The accountants believe Madoff regularly sent bundles of money to offshore accounts in the Caribbean and Europe, the Observer newspaper in London reported yesterday. Madoff, 70, has been ordered by a Manhattan fed eral judge to provide to the Securities and Exchange Commission by New Year's Eve a detailed list of all of his assets - in cluding investments, loans, lines of credit, business interests and brokerage accounts. But tracking what happened to the estimated $50 billion Madoff is accused of making off with is already promising to be one of the...

Reuters: Hedge fund executive Ezra Merkin has been sued again for entrusting investments with confessed swindler Bernard Madoff , this time by New York University , which said it lost about $24 million. The lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court is among a series against Merkin and other funds during the past week as investors seek to recover losses from the purported $50 billion Madoff scandal that would be Wall Street 's biggest fraud. A judge issued a temporary order on Wednesday, barring Merkin from liquidating Ariel Fund Ltd, named in the lawsuit by New York University, which calls itself the largest private university in the United States . The order, which expires on January 6, will have no impact on plans announced December 18 to wind down the Ariel fund, Merkin's attorney Andrew Levander said in a statement. He said the investment manager would not receive fees and attorneys had pr...

AFP: As a probe intensifies into Bernard Madoff , doubts are growing on whether the now-infamous Wall Street investment manager could have committed a record fraud of 50 billion dollars on his own. In a criminal complaint filed against the 70-year-old Madoff, prosecutors said Madoff stated "in substance, that he had personally traded and lost money for institutional clients and that it was all his fault." But many members of the financial community are skeptical that Madoff could have single-handedly maintained accounts for the fictitious investment scheme involving tens of billions of dollars and a multitude of clients. "It doesn't seem to me that a 70-year-old man can do this by himself, nor can he do it simply in conjunction with his accountants," said Doug Kass , founder and president of Seabreeze Partners, a fund that uses "short" sales in an effort to benefit from falli...