The estate of one of Bernard Madoff’s oldest friends agreed to pay the con man’s victims $277 million to settle claims that the Beverly Hills money manager, who died in 2010, got rich from Madoff’s fraud at the expense of thousands of investors, including his own clients, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. Stanley Chais, who was well-known in the U.S. and Israel for his donations to Jewish charities, was also one of Madoff’s earliest investors. But after the Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008, Chais denied knowing about it, insisting he’d been duped along with everyone else. That didn’t stop the lawsuits against him, which his estate has been battling for years. Now, the estate is ready to move on: It will pay more than $262 million to Irving Picard, the New York-based trustee liquidating Madoff’s firm and another $15 million to California’s attorney general to resolve a related class-action lawsuit, Picard said on Friday. Read more.
For a further analysis of commercial fraud, make sure to pick up a copy of ABI’s Fraud and Forensics: Piercing Through the Deception in a Commercial Fraud Case.