Financier Bernard Madoff leaves the Manhattan federal courthouse in New York City on March 10, 2009. Madoff attended a hearing on the conflicting status of his legal representation in his multibillion-dollar fraud allegations.
Chris Hondros | Getty Images
The 10th and final distribution from a fund for victims of late Ponzi scheme king Bernie Madoff began Monday, the Justice Department said.
The latest payout of more than $131 million will go to more than 23,000 victims worldwide. When completed, the fund will have distributed more than $4.3 billion to more 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 from the Madoff Victim Fund was announced some 16 years after Madoff’s fraud came 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 head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 felony charges in connection with what federal prosecutors said was the largest Ponzi scheme in the world.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for the fraud, which spanned four decades and involved paying off clients with funds collected from other clients rather than, as he claimed, trading profits from investments.
He died in April 2021 at the age of 82 in a federal prison facility in North Carolina, nearly a year after his request for release was rejected due to a terminal kidney disease.
When Madoff’s fraud first became public knowledge, prosecutors estimated the total damage at $65 billion. But this estimate fell sharply after authorities deducted the amount 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, came from a civil forfeiture of the estate of Jeffry Picower, a now-deceased Madoff investor, the DOJ said.
Another $1.7 billion came from it JPMorgan Chase under a deferred prosecution agreement 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 victims’ fund came 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.