Estate of Madoff insider Picower agrees to settle $7.2 billion claims: report
17 Dec 2010
The estate of Jeffry Picower, the billionaire beneficiary of Bernard Madoff's investment fraud, has agreed to settle $7.2 billion claims by a trustee recovering investor money lost in the Madoff investment scam, reports quoting people familiar with the situation said.
Picower, a major investor in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme who died of a heart attack in Florida in October 2009, was sued by the trustee and federal US prosecutors for $7.2 billion while Madoff (72) himself is serving a 150-year jail term in a federal prison in North Carolina after pleading guilty in March 2009 to carrying out a decades-long fraud scheme.
Under the settlement agreed to by Picower's widow Barbara, court-appointed trustee Irving Picard would collect $5 billion, and the US attorney's office in Manhattan would seize $2.2 billion in a civil suit.
Earlier this month, the family of Carl Shapiro, another friend of Madoff, had reached a $625 million settlement with the trustee.
The settlement, the largest related to the Ponzi scheme so far, must be approved by judges in the US district court and the federal bankruptcy court.
The latest settlement would bring total recoveries overseen by Picard on behalf of investors so far to about $10 billion. Picard estimates Madoff victims to have lost $20 billion in the fraud.
US. Prosecutors had initially estimated the fraud took in about $65 billion.