Financier Bernard Madoff leaves Manhattan federal court March 10, 2009 in New York. Madoff attended a hearing regarding the conflicting status of his legal representation in his multibillion-dollar fraud allegations.
Chris Hondros | Getty Images
The 10th and last distribution from the fund for the victims of the deceased Ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff it started on monday, Ministry of Justice he said.
The latest payout, more than $131 million, is being sent to more than 23,000 victims worldwide. When completed, the fund will distribute more than $4.3 billion to more than 40,000 victims in nearly 130 countries, the DOJ said.
That total is nearly 94% of estimated total fraud losses, the department said.
Final payment by Madoff Victims Fund it was published approximately 16 years after Madoff’s fraud came to light.
“Today’s distribution represents an unprecedented conclusion of compensation to victims of asset forfeiture litigation related to the Madoff scheme,” said FBI New York Assistant Director James Dennehy.
“These victims implicitly trusted Madoff with their investments only to end up losing significant money to his selfish agenda,” Dennehy said.
Madoff, who was the head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 felony counts 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 paying off customers with money collected from other customers, rather than profits from investment trading as he claimed.
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 terminal kidney disease was denied.
The bulk of the Madoff victims’ fund, about $2.2 billion, came from the civil forfeiture of Jeffry Picower, a now-dead Madoff investor, the DOJ said.
Another $1.7 billion came in JPMorgan Chase as part of a agreement on suspension of criminal prosecution with the DOJ in January 2014. JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor institutions served as the primary bank through which Madoff operated his scheme, the DOJ previously said.
The remainder of the victim funds came from “a civil forfeiture action against investor Carl Shapiro and his family and a civil and criminal forfeiture action against Bernard L. Madoff, Peter B. Madoff and their co-conspirators,” the DOJ noted Monday.
