Financier Bernard Madoff leaves Manhattan Federal Court on March 10, 2009 in New York City. Madoff attended a hearing regarding the conflicting status of his legal representation in allegations of multibillion-dollar fraud.
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The tenth and final distribution from the deceased’s victims’ fund Ponzi King of the chart Bernie Madoff I started on Monday, Ministry of Justice He said.
The latest batch, worth more than $131 million, is being sent to more than 23,000 victims around the world. When completed, more than $4.3 billion will be distributed by the fund to more than 40,000 victims in about 130 countries, the Justice Department said.
The ministry said this number represents approximately 94% of the total estimated losses from the scam.
Final exchange before Madoff Victims Fund It was announced almost 16 years after the Madoff scam came to light.
“Today’s distribution represents an unprecedented outcome to compensate victims of civil forfeiture actions related to the Madoff scheme,” said James Dennehy, Assistant Director of the FBI in New York.
“These victims implicitly trusted Madoff with their investments, but ultimately lost significant amounts of money to his selfish scheme,” Dennehy said.
Madoff, who was chairman of Bernard L. Madoff Financial Investments in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 felonies related to what federal prosecutors said was the world's largest Ponzi scheme.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for the fraud, which spanned four decades and involved repaying clients with money collected from other clients, not with investment trading gains as he claimed.
he He died In April 2021, at the age of 82, in a federal prison in North Carolina, nearly a year after his request for compassionate release due to kidney disease was rejected.
The Justice Department said the bulk of the money allocated to Madoff's victims, about $2.2 billion, came from the civil forfeiture of the estate of Jeffrey Picower, a now-deceased Madoff investor.
Another $1.7 billion came from… JPMorgan Chase As part of a Deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department in January 2014. The Justice Department previously said that JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor institutions served as the primary bank through which Madoff ran his scheme.
The Justice Department noted Monday that the rest of the victims' money came from “a civil forfeiture action against investor Carl Shapiro and his family and from civil and criminal forfeiture actions against Bernard L. Madoff, Peter P. Madoff, and their co-conspirators.” .