Legal News

More Than 8,000 Potential Madoff Victims Sent Claim Forms

By Dan Slater

One of the big questions in the Madoff case is just how many investors were burned. A statement released today by the court-appointed trustee in the liquidation of Madoff’s investment advisory firm gets at part of the answer.

The WSJ’s Amir Efrati reports that Irving Picard (pictured), the trustee for Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, announced that he mailed claim forms to more than 8,000 potential victims of the alleged Ponzi scheme run by Madoff.

The mailing list of more than 8,000 institutions or individuals who had open accounts at Madoff’s investment-advisory business within the past 12 months is an indication that the number of potential victims is bigger than previously known. And even that tally doesn’t include other investors whose accounts may have been opened but closed earlier, or were customers of “feeder funds” that brought in billions of dollars into the Madoff firm.

Picard will attempt to locate any assets held by the Madoff firm and distribute them among victims of the alleged fraud. The Securities Investor Protection Corp., a securities-industry nonprofit formed to help customers of failed brokerages, can pay out as much as $500,000 per customer for theft of securities from a brokerage, including a maximum of $100,000 on claims for theft of cash.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 05, 2009 (boomark / email).