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Financier Bernard Madoff leaves Manhattan federal court on March 10, 2009 in New York City. Madoff attended a hearing over the conflicting status of his legal representation in his multi-million dollar fraud allegations.
Chris Hondros | fake images
The tenth and final distribution of a fund for the victims of the deceased ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff started on Monday, Department of Justice saying.
The latest disbursement, of more than $131 million, is being sent to more than 23,000 victims around the world. When complete, the fund will have distributed more than $4.3 billion to more than 40,000 victims in nearly 130 countries, the Justice Department said.
That figure is nearly 94% of the total estimated losses from the scam, the department said.
The final disbursement by the Madoff Victims Fund It was announced approximately 16 years after Madoff’s fraud came to light.
“Today’s distribution represents an unprecedented completion of compensation to victims of civil forfeiture actions related to the Madoff scheme,” said Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, James Dennehy.
“These victims implicitly trusted Madoff with their investments only to ultimately lose significant money in his selfish scheme,” Dennehy said.
Madoff, who was a director at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 crimes related to what federal prosecutors have 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 him paying clients with money collected from other clients, not investment trading profits as he claimed.
He deceased in April 2021, at age 82, in a federal prison in North Carolina, nearly a year after he was denied a request for compassionate release due to end-stage renal disease.
The bulk of the fund for Madoff victims, about $2.2 billion, came from a civil forfeiture recovery from the estate of Jeffry Picower, a now-deceased Madoff investor, the Justice Department said.
Another $1.7 billion came from JPMorgan Chase as part of a deferred processing agreement with the DOJ in January 2014. JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor institutions had served as the primary bank through which Madoff operated his scheme, the DOJ previously said.
The remainder of the victims’ fund 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 B. Madoff and their co-conspirators,” the court noted. Monday the Department of Justice. .
