The tenth and final distribution from a fund for victims of the late Ponzi scheme King Bernie Madoff began Monday Ministry of Justice said.
The latest payout of greater than $131 million will go to greater than 23,000 victims worldwide. When accomplished, the fund may have distributed greater than $4.3 billion to greater than 40,000 victims in nearly 130 countries, the DOJ said.
That amount represents nearly 94% of the estimated total losses from the fraud, the department said.
The final payout by the Madoff Victims Fund was announced some 16 years after Madoff's fraud got here to light.
“Today’s distribution represents an unprecedented completion of victim compensation from civil forfeiture claims related to the Madoff scheme,” said James Dennehy, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office.
“These victims quietly entrusted Madoff with their investments, only to ultimately lose significant funds as a result of his selfish scheme,” Dennehy said.
Madoff, the top of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 felony charges in reference to what federal prosecutors said was the most important Ponzi scheme on this planet.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for the fraud, which spanned 4 many years and involved paying off clients with funds collected from other clients relatively than, as he claimed, trading profits from investments.
He died in April 2021 on the age of 82 in a federal prison facility in North Carolina, nearly a 12 months after his request for release was rejected resulting from a terminal kidney disease.
When Madoff's fraud first became public knowledge, prosecutors estimated the full damage at $65 billion. But this estimate fell sharply after authorities deducted the quantity of phantom investment profits and interest that Madoff's clients were deceived into believing existed.
Most of the fund for Madoff's victims, about $2.2 billion, got here from a civil forfeiture of the estate of Jeffry Picower, a now-deceased Madoff investor, the DOJ said.
Another $1.7 billion got here from it JPMorgan Chase as a part of one Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the DOJ in January 2014. JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor institutions served as the first bank through which Madoff ran his scheme, the DOJ previously said.
The remainder of the victims' fund got here from a “civil forfeiture action against investor Carl Shapiro and his family, as well as civil and criminal forfeiture actions against Bernard L. Madoff, Peter B. Madoff and their co-conspirators,” the DOJ said Monday.
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