Bernard Madoff was generous to his employees and didn’t have policies in place for corporate credit cards used by executives to pay for family vacations and thousands of dollars worth of wine, a jury was told, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. There wasn’t an obvious business purpose for many charges, including trips to Disney World and Las Vegas, that Madoff’s securities firm paid each month, Charlene White told jurors yesterday in the trial of five former employees accused aiding Madoff’s $17 billion fraud. White’s job included running dozens of monthly reports and helping process company checks. White, who started as a temporary employee at Madoff’s securities firm in 1993, was the second witness to testify in the first criminal trial stemming from the fraud uncovered at the peak of the financial crisis five years ago. U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain in Manhattan said the trial could last as long as five months.
