Bernard L. Madoff cost clients $50 billion: claim
From http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2616
A US federal court has imposed an emergency freeze on the assets of Bernard L. Madoff, a New York “investment adviser,” head of one of the largest third market dealers on the New York Stock Exchange, and influential Zionist financier, in a case the government says could well be the worst financial fraud scheme in Wall Street history.
According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the court also agreed to the federal government’s request to appoint a receiver in anticipation of a class action lawsuit that already has five plaintiffs claiming losses of up to $100 million, and which may eventually see over a thousand Madoff clients, among them family members, banks, nonprofits and wealthy jetsetters seeking the return of as much as $50 billion.
Madoff, Chairman of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, was arrested on December 11 at his $5 million Manhattan apartment, one of five homes he owns in Europe and America, after his sons informed on him to the federal government. According to the Times of London, Madoff made damaging admissions to agents when confronted, telling them that “‘There is no innocent explanation.’ The agents say that he told them ‘he paid investors with money that wasn’t there,’ that he was ‘broke’ and that he expected to go to jail.”
Charged with one count of securities fraud, Madoff, who had been accused of unethical business practices in the pat, is free on a $10 million bond. If convicted he could be sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison and be fined $5 million.Media outlets report that the night before his arrest Madoff, 70, had allegedly confessed to his sons that his firm was in fact a huge “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5683 are named for Charles Ponzi, who was imprisoned in 1920 after a spectacular scam that stole only a fraction in real sums of what Madoff stands accused of taking. Ponzi schemers generally appeal to the greed of their victims, offering enormous rates of return while in actual fact using new investments to pay off earlier investors, perpetuating the illusion of a growing, successful investment program. Ideally, the scammer escapes with the cash before the whole edifice collapses or someone complains to the police.
For Madoff, the scam appears to have begun to unravel in November, when a number of investors sought to cash out to the tune of $7 billion.
The fact that Madoff’s sons, who he employed, alerted the feds to the scheme may be related to reports that many of Madoff’s alleged marks were family members and friends, a common aspect of many Ponzi schemes. Bernie Madoff’s alleged victims were not the kind of unsophisticated “rubes” some might expect to fall victim to such a scam. According to the New York Times, among them are people like Fred Wilpon, who owns a controlling interest in the New York Mets baseball team and Norman Braman, former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles NFL franchise. “There are people who were very, very well off a few days ago who are now virtually destitute,” one Manhattan lawyer told the Times. “They have nothing left but their apartments or homes — which they are going to have to sell to get money to live on.”
Even a private Swiss investment bank is apparently on the Madoff hook. Banque Benedict Hentsch Fairfield Partners SA sank $47.5 million worth of client investments in Madoff’s alleged scheme, an admission the Geneva bank made online.
Madoff’s arrest couldn’t have come at a much worse time for him or for the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5821 of much of the news in the US.
There is no denying that some ethnic Jews have played a disproportionate role in the events leading to the financial crisis, leading Zionist fearmongering groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to decry the supposed potential growth of “anti-Semitism” as a result.
In one remarkable case, a skit lampooning the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5802 would lose the election.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin discussed the SNL censorship effort, which was so complete that NBC even deleted posts on its sites that so much as questioned why the skit had been pulled. According the Malkin, “the Sandlers are left-wing moguls who built a mortgage company whose major product was subprime mortgages and they sold it to Wachovia for $24.2 billion in 2006. And what do the Sandlers do when they are not peddling subprime garbage? They are busy writing checks to http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3449 must be livid as well. Anyone else smell a legal threat behind the disappearance of the vid?” (Recently, YouTube gave the ADL permission to police videos on the popular website to locate and censor any content deemed politically incorrect by the ADL. With “mainstream” newspapers across the United States faced with financial collapse, the ADL and similar private, special interest groups are anxious to get a handle on the internet and its potential to fill the information gap with uncensored news and opinion).
Assuming that the “concern” of Zionist “watchdogs” about a rise in “anti-Semitism” as a result of the financial crisis is genuine, and not mere cynicism, then Bernie Madoff’s close identification with, and support for, Zionist causes must be worrisome indeed for them. The New York Times talks about one Jewish group which trusted Madoff with its finances, the Robert I. Lappin Charitable Foundation. The Times diplomatically says that the Lappin Foundation “works to reverse the dilution of Jewish identity through intermarriage and assimilation by sending teenagers to Israel and supporting other Jewish education efforts,” a “little foundation” that at one point had $7 million invested through Madoff’s operations. In the aftermath of Madoff’s arrest, the Lappin Foundation has fired all of its staff and “shut down its programs to cope with its losses in the Madoff funds.”
Madoff was also connected with New York’s Yeshiva University, the oldest Jewish college in the United States, a member of Yeshiva University’s Board of Trustees and serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Sy Syms School of Business where, according to the school, “Jewish tradition provides the framework for consideration of ethical issues, an integral part of the student’s education.” The business school connection, especially, is something Yeshiva probably won’t want to brag about, though they have listed him as “a Benefactor” who “recently made a major gift to the Sy Syms School.”
Madoff also served as national treasurer of the American Jewish Congress (AJC), a leading Zionist organization which raises support for Israel, where both the AJC and Yeshiva University maintain offices.
There has been a lot of talk about http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5719 recently. At the height of the Presidential campaign the supposed rivals, Obama and McCain, came out in support of the enormous bailout of financial firms, a cost borne not only by taxpayers but also by the generations to come, saddled with deficit legacies. While financial institutions easily got their handouts, much more opposition, fueled largely by lingering taxpayer resentment over the Wall Street welfare payouts, is now being raised to proposals to bail out the car industry. The industry is a tottering vestige of America’s former smokestack economy and the high wages, unionization and economic well being that went with it and which lifted blue collar workers into the middle class. Globalization has largely destroyed the old pillars of the US economy, gutted the wage scale, decimated the industrial sector in favor of the service economy, and made the eight hour day largely a thing of the past.
But http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=6062 are still on the agenda, with proposals of varying seriousness to bail out any number of stressed businesses, not least the outmoded fishwrap print media, from newspapers and magazines to book publishers. Who wants to bet that before long we’ll hear the alleged “victims” of Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, putting their hands out too?