A U.S. appeals court yesterday closed another avenue for Bernard Madoff's victims to recoup money they lost, saying the trustee liquidating the swindler's firm can ignore transfers of fake profits between customer accounts when determining payouts, Reuters reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled yesterday against several dozen former customers of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, including onetime New York Mets second baseman Tim Teufel, in endorsing trustee Irving Picard’s methodology. It means that victims still scrambling to recover their money, 8-1/2 years after Madoff's December 2008 arrest, must wait longer. "We recognize that our decision today provides no remedy to appellants, who have undoubtedly suffered along with too many others as a result of Madoff's Ponzi scheme," the three-judge panel wrote. "We continue to refuse, however, to treat fictitious and arbitrarily assigned paper profits as real and to give legal effect to Madoff's machinations," it added. Read more.
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