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A federal judge on Thursday rejected Bernard Madoff’s request to be released early from prison because he was dying of kidney failure, saying the swindler has never fully accepted responsibility for his massive, decades-long Ponzi scheme, Reuters reported. Circuit Judge Denny Chin, who called Madoff’s crimes “extraordinarily evil” when imposing a 150-year sentence in June 2009, wrote that while Madoff’s failing health was “most unfortunate,” compassionate release was unwarranted. “When I sentenced Mr. Madoff in 2009, it was fully my intent that he live out the rest of his life in prison,” Judge Chin wrote. “Nothing has happened in the 11 years since to change my thinking.” The judge called Madoff’s fraud “one of the egregious financial crimes of our time.” Madoff’s lawyer, Brandon Sample, expressed disappointment that Chin found Madoff “beyond redemption,” and said his client’s last hope was for President Donald Trump to commute his sentence.

The U.S. Supreme Court let the liquidator of Bernard Madoff’s investment firm press ahead with efforts to recoup $3 billion from European banks and other overseas investors, Bloomberg News reported. The justices, without comment yesterday, turned away an appeal by investors led by HSBC Holdings Plc who said trustee Irving Picard was impermissibly trying to apply U.S. bankruptcy law to foreign transactions. A federal appeals court let Picard sue the investors. The case affects foreign customers of Fairfield Greenwich Group and other offshore feeder funds that channeled investors’ money to Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. The investors include Koch Industries, whose chairman and chief executive officer, Charles Koch, is a major Republican patron. The investors allegedly withdrew more money than they put in before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008. The money is the biggest remaining bucket of cash being sought by Picard as he tries to compensate customers who lost $19 billion in principal after Madoff’s arrest. So far Picard has recovered more than $14 billion and distributed more than $13 billion to victims — significantly more than many predicted when he was appointed in 2008.

NMC Health PLC, a hospital operator based in the United Arab Emirates that collapsed amid allegations of a multibillion-dollar fraud, filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. and could liquidate as it faces shareholder lawsuits over its financial irregularities, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which does business mainly in the Middle East but also in other regions, including the U.S., was placed into administration by a U.K. court last month following the discovery of a hole in its books of more than $3 billion. NMC Health yesterday filed for chapter 15 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. Founded by Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty, NMC Health operates a network that includes 38 hospitals and 146 medical centers in 19 countries. The Indian-born Shetty and Emirati billionaire Khaleefa Butti Omair Yousif Ahmed al-Muhairi, formerly NMC’s executive vice chairman, resigned from the company’s board in February. The company, now overseen by three Alvarez & Marsal Europe LLP administrators, said the U.S. bankruptcy filing is intended to put a stop to collection and enforcement actions, giving it time to evaluate how to best manage its U.S. medical practices and other assets. World-wide, it has about 20,000 employees, including about 2,000 doctors.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is warning college students about coronavirus-related phishing scams in which the scammers are pretending to have information about their direct payments from the IRS, The Hill reported. "Maybe you or your friends have gotten an email claiming to be from the 'Financial Department' of your university. The email tells you to click on a link to get a message about your COVID-19 economic stimulus check — and it needs to be opened through a portal link requiring your university login," Ari Lazarus, a consumer education specialist at the FTC said in a blog post on the agency's website. "Don’t do it." "It’s a phishing scam," Lazarus added. "If you click to 'log in,' you could be giving your user name, password, or other personal information to scammers, while possibly downloading malware onto your device." The FTC said students who spot emails that look like they are phishing scams can report them to the Anti-Phishing Working Group — which includes internet service providers, security vendors, financial institutions and law enforcement agencies — at reportphishing@apwg.org as well as to the FTC at ftc.gov/complaint.

Fraudsters are increasingly using pilfered credit-card numbers and phishing attacks to prey on overwhelmed consumers and banks during the coronavirus pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. There has been a big jump in attempted credit- and debit-card fraud since coronavirus shut down the U.S. economy earlier this year, according to Fidelity National Information Services Inc., known as FIS, which assists about 3,200 U.S. banks with fraud monitoring. The dollar volume of attempted fraudulent transactions rose 35 percent in April from a year earlier, FIS said, a trend that appears to be continuing in May. Most of the fraudulent transactions were caught before they hit cardholders’ accounts, FIS said, but the spike in attempts presents another challenge for consumers and their lenders muddling through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Credit-card purchases have fallen over the past two months, and millions of out-of-work borrowers have stopped making their monthly payments. A rise in successful fraud attempts could lead to higher losses for card issuers and, ultimately, higher costs for consumers.

The novel coronavirus outbreak and economic fallout is proving to be a bonanza for whistleblower lawyers as the U.S. securities regulator cracks down on a range of related misconduct from companies touting sham cures to misuse of federal aid, Reuters reported. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fielded about 4,000 complaints from mid-March to mid-May, a 35 percent increase on the year-ago period, Steven Peikin, the agency’s co-head of enforcement, said this month as cases of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, shot up. Two factors appear to be driving the current surge in tips, according to lawyers: the sheer scale of the crisis has sparked a wave of misconduct across all areas of the SEC’s remit, and mass unemployment has unleashed whistleblowers who may otherwise have feared retaliation by their employers.

The novel coronavirus could slow investigations into corporate wrongdoing by prosecutors, regulators and federal agents as shelter-in-place orders and other restrictions force delays to crucial steps in their work, the Wall Street Journal reported. Some investigative activities, including ones requiring travel or face-to-face meetings, are taking more time, and that could raise concerns for time-sensitive cases, said Daniel Kahn, a senior deputy chief in the U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal fraud section. “The most difficult part of this is doing in-person interviews,” Kahn said. He added that getting documents from overseas also is proving more difficult than usual. “For the most part we are finding ways to do that,” he said. “It just sometimes can be a little bit slower.” By contrast, much of the government’s investigative work, such as issuing subpoenas, executing email search warrants, reviewing documents and meeting with defense counsel can be done remotely and is continuing as normal, Kahn said.

Model and social-media influencer Kendall Jenner has agreed to pay $90,000 to settle a lawsuit over an Instagram post promoting Fyre Festival, the 2017 music event whose collapse went viral online, spawned two documentaries and resulted in prison for the organizer, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The since-deleted Instagram post was the subject of a 2019 lawsuit brought by a bankruptcy trustee who is recovering money for Fyre Festival creditors who lost money in the event. Artists including Migos, Pusha T, Blink-182 and Lil Yachty who were booked but never performed at the event were also sued to recover money paid by festival organizer William “Billy” McFarland. Terms of the settlement were described in papers filed Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Jenner, who has 129 million Instagram followers, was allegedly paid $250,000 for the Instagram post promoting the event and was paid an additional $25,000 days later by McFarland’s Fyre Media Inc., according to the lawsuit brought by bankruptcy trustee Gregory Messer. The settlement was reached after Jenner and the trustee agreed to mediation late last year.