Courtesy of Pam Martens.
A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me yesterday reading the U.S. Justice Department’s settlement documents with JPMorgan in the Madoff case. I knew I had read most of this before. As it turns out, Irving Picard, the trustee for victims of the Madoff fraud had exquisitely presented all of this evidence in an amended complaint that he filed in court on June 24, 2011 – two and one-half years ago.
There is one huge difference between what Picard entered into the public court record and what the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, entered into the public record yesterday: Picard named names – at JPMorgan and at the feeder funds that blindly shoveled billions to Madoff. All of that explosive naming detail is missing in Bharara’s neat settlement, suggesting that is how the U.S. Attorney’s office wrung such an expensive settlement out of JPMorgan in exchange for no prosecutions of individuals and a deferred prosecution agreement against JPMorgan itself.
JPMorgan will pay $1.7 billion to the U.S. Justice Department to compensate victims of the fraud. It will pay another $543 million to Picard’s trustee fund to compensate victims; and it will pay a $350 million fine to the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
We’ve been researching and writing on the Madoff fraud since the news first broke in December 2008. Below we present some of the critical pieces of the puzzle explaining how Madoff perpetrated the scheme for so long with the willful blindness of so many.
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Why Did the Justice Department Kill the Madoff Subpoena Against JPMorgan?
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