This month, as Bernard L. Madoff completes the third year of a 150-year sentence for masterminding his global Ponzi scheme, the top courts in the U.S. and Britain are tackling issues that could have a multibillion-dollar impact on thousands of his victims, The New York Times Dealbook reported yesterday. The U.S. Supreme Court justices will confer today on whether to take up the fiercely disputed issue of how victim losses in the Madoff scheme should be calculated. A federal bankruptcy judge and a Federal Appeals Court in Manhattan have blessed the method employed by Madoff Trustee Irving H. Picard. That approach measures losses as the difference between the cash deposited and the cash withdrawn from Madoff accounts in the years before the Ponzi scheme collapsed in December 2008. Those out-of-pocket cash losses total less than $20 billion, according to Picard. If the Court decides to review the issue, that final reckoning would be further postponed.
