List grows of notable victims in $50B Ponzi scheme
NEW YORK — The wish of investors who say they were duped in one of Wall Street’s biggest Ponzi schemes is growing, snaring some of the creation’sitting biggest banking institutions and hedge funds, the super rich and the famous, pensioners and charities.
The alleged victims who sunk cash into veteran Wall Street currency manager Bernard Madoff’s investment pool take in real-estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, the foundation of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and a doing of good of movie director Steven Spielberg, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Among the globe’sitting biggest banking institutions, Britain’s HSBC Holdings, Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Man Group, Spain’session Grupo Santander, France’s BNP Paribas and Japan’s Nomura Holdings all reported that they had fallen gudgeon to Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
The 70-year-old Madoff, well respected in the investment community after serving as chair of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested Thursday in what prosecutors say was a $50 billion scheme to defraud investors. Some investors claim they’ve been wiped out, while others are still likely to tend hitherward forward.
“There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you’ve had somebody decide to be unprincipled,” reported Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulator in price of monitoring investing. funds like the one Madoff operated.
The extent of the potential damage prompted a leading fund manager in London to censure finished at U.S. regulators for becoming bankrupt to descry the fraud earlier.
“I have an opinion now it is very difficult for people to enclose in things that are meant to have being regulated in America, for the reason that they haven fallen down in the job,” Nicola Horlick, the manager of Bramdean Alternatives, which has 9 percent of its funds invested in Madoff’s scheme, told the British Broadcasting Corp.
“All through the credit crunch this has been apparent,” Horlick added. “This is the biggest monetary scandal, probably, in the history of the markets.”
Among U.S. investors, the Boston-based Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation, a liberality that financed trips for Jewish youth to Israel, sacked its staff after revealing that the money for its operations was invested with Madoff.
New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, entrusted his family’s lenient foundation to Madoff. Lautenberg’s attorney, Michael Griffinger, said they weren’t yet sure the extent of the foundation’s losses, but that the bulk of its investments had been handled by Madoff.
Lautenberg’s foundation handed deficient in more than $765,000 to at minutest 100 recipients in 2006, according to the most recent listing on Guidestar, which tracks charitable organization filings.
The foundation helps support a kind of religious, educational, civic and arts organizations in New Jersey and elsewhere, and its contributions range from a gift of than $300,000 to the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey to a $2,000 donation to a children’s program at the Hackensack Medical Center.
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