Financier Bernard Madoff leaves federal court in Manhattan on March 10, 2009 in New York. Madoff attended a hearing regarding the conflicting status of his legal representation amid multibillion-dollar fraud allegations.
Chris Hondros | Getty Images
10th and final payment from the fund for deceased victims Ponzi king of the scheme Bernie Madoff started on Monday, Department of Justice he said.
The latest payment of more than $131 million was sent 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 Justice Department said.
The department said this figure represented almost 94% of the estimated total losses from the fraud.
Final payout by Madoff Victims Fund was announced roughly 16 years after the Madoff fraud came to light.
“Today's distribution represents an unprecedented summary of compensation for victims of civil forfeiture claims related to the Madoff scheme,” said James Dennehy, deputy director of the FBI's New York Field Office.
“These victims implicitly trusted Madoff with their investments only to ultimately lose significant money as a result of his selfish scheme,” Dennehy said.
Madoff, who was head of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities in New York, pleaded guilty in March 2009 to 11 crimes related to what federal prosecutors say was the world's largest Ponzi scheme.
Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for a fraud that spanned four decades and involved repaying clients with money collected from other clients rather than, as he claimed, profits from investment transactions.
He died in April 2021, at age 82, in a federal prison in North Carolina, almost a year after he was denied a request for compassionate release due to terminal kidney disease.
When Madoff's fraud first came to light, prosecutors estimated total losses at $65 billion. But that's an estimate plummeted when authorities deducted the amount of apparent investment gains and interest that Madoff's clients were led to believe.
The Justice Department said the largest portion of the fund for Madoff victims, about $2.2 billion, came from the civil recovery of the estate of Jeffry Picower, a now-deceased Madoff investor.
This contributed another $1.7 billion JPMorgan Chase as part deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice in January 2014. As previously stated by the Department of Justice, JPMorgan Chase and its predecessor institutions were the primary bank through which Madoff operated his scheme.
The remainder of the victims' fund came from “a civil forfeiture action against investor Carl Shapiro and his family and a civil and criminal forfeiture action against Bernard L. Madoff, Peter B. Madoff and their co-conspirators,” the Justice Department noted on Monday.