Billions Withdrawn Before Madoff Arrest: Records

About $12 billion was pulled out of accounts at Bernard L. Madoff’s firm in 2008, according to several people briefed on an analysis of Mr. Madoff’s business records.

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About $6 billion, or half, was taken out in just the three months before the financier was arrested in December and charged with operating an extensive Ponzi scheme, these people said.

Those figures offer a bit of hope for Mr. Madoff’s thousands of defrauded customers. Under federal law, the trustee overseeing the Madoff bankruptcy can sue to retrieve that money from the investors who withdrew it.

Indeed, the trustee, Irving H. Picard of Baker & Hostetler, filed two lawsuits on Tuesday seeking the return of a total of $6.1 billion, which he estimated had been withdrawn over the last decade.

One case seeks the return of $5.1 billion from various trust funds and partnerships run by Jeffry M. Picower, a prominent Palm Beach, Fla., investor whose charitable foundation was considered one of the notable victims of Mr. Madoff’s fraud.

Mr. Picard also sued to recover $1 billion withdrawn last year by Harley International, a hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands and administered by a unit of the Dutch bank Fortis.

Both lawsuits were filed in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. And both assert that the defendants, as professional investors, should have realized that their profits were too high and too consistent — and Mr. Madoff’s paperwork and procedures were too sloppy — to be legitimate.

But the complaint against Mr. Picower goes further, accusing him of participating in a web of transparently false transactions with Mr. Madoff that were aimed at compensating him for “perpetuating the Ponzi scheme” at the expense of other investors.

In 1999, for example, one of Mr. Picower’s accounts posted an annual profit of more than 950 percent, the suit said. That account was one of two that reported annual returns from 1996 to 1999 ranging from 120 percent to more than 550 percent, the suit said.

In other accounts, backdated transactions generated billions of dollars of fictional year-end losses and one account grew by 30 percent in just two weeks in 2006 — thanks to trades that purportedly occurred months before the account was even opened.

A lawyer for Mr. Picower and his wife, Barbara, who was also named as a defendant, denied the allegations.

“Mr. and Mrs. Picower considered themselves friends of the Madoffs for over 35 years,” said the lawyer, William D. Zabel of Schulte Roth & Zabel. “They were totally shocked by his fraud and were in no way complicit in it.”

Mr. Zabel added: “They lost billions in personal assets, and most dear to them, all of the assets of their esteemed foundation.” The Picower Foundation closed its doors after Mr. Madoff’s arrest.

According to people familiar with the analysis of Mr. Madoff’s cash records, most of the $12 billion that flowed out of his fraudulent money-management operation last year was withdrawn by various “feeder funds,” which had raised cash from investors and pooled it to invest with Mr. Madoff.

Several of those feeder funds have already been the targets of lawsuits by Mr. Picard, who is searching for assets to be shared among customers who lost what they believed to be almost $65 billion in the Ponzi scheme.

It is not clear where the cash taken out of the Madoff accounts is located, or how much of it can be recovered through litigation.

In the lawsuit seeking to recover more than $1 billion withdrawn by Harley International, Mr. Picard asserts that the fund should have detected the fraud before investing more than $2 billion of its clients’ money.

According to that complaint, Harley International made 14 transfers out of its Madoff account over the last six years, including $425 million that was withdrawn three months before the Ponzi scheme became public.

A spokeswoman for Harley International, Jamie Moss, did not return calls seeking comment.

In the complaint, Mr. Picard said Harley International, which invested client money with Mr. Madoff since at least 1996, received “unrealistically high and consistent annual returns” of about 13.5 percent. That outpaced the swings in the stock index on which Mr. Madoff had apparently based his trading strategy.

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Trading records indicate that the Madoff firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, made at least 148 stock trades in Harley International’s account in the last decade at prices that did not match the trading range for those stocks on the dates the trades supposedly occurred.

Mr. Picard claims those trades should have raised red flags for “any investment professional managing the account.”

The Harley lawsuit is similar to one Mr. Picard has filed recently against J. Ezra Merkin, the New York financier who lost over $2 billion investing with Mr. Madoff.

The lawsuit against Mr. Picower mirrors similar allegations Mr. Picard made in a complaint against Stanley Chais, an investment manager and prominent Los Angeles philanthropist. Both investors have said they intend to fight the lawsuits.

Mr. Picard has raised about $1 billion in assets for Mr. Madoff’s victims, but the lawsuits filed in the last two weeks could push that number much higher.

Mr. Madoff pleaded guilty on March 12 to running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. He is scheduled to be sentenced next month and faces 150 years in prison.

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This story originally appeared in the The New York Times