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The trustee liquidating Peregrine Financial Group Inc. said that only about 11 of 24,000 futures customers have "specifically identifiable property" eligible to be returned to them, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Peregrine founder Russell R. Wasendorf Sr., 64, admitted stealing at least $100 million from the Cedar Falls, Iowa-based firm, according to an FBI affidavit accompanying a criminal complaint unsealed upon his July 13 arrest. The National Futures Association reported July 9 that Peregrine appeared to be missing at least $200 million in client funds. Wasendorf attempted suicide outside the firm’s headquarters that day. Trustee Ira Bodenstein said that the assets he is seeking to return are defined as securities, warehouse receipts, cash and other assets that are registered in customers' names and are not transferable. The 11 eligible customers mostly hold warehouse receipts for precious metals, he said in a court filing.

Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities Inc., is laying claim to four homes owned by Bernard Madoff’s two sons and their spouses as he seeks to recoup money lost in the Ponzi scheme, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Picard filed lis pendens notices last week on two homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, and two luxury condominiums in Manhattan purchased by Mark and Andrew Madoff and their wives, according to public records. The documents alert potential buyers and lenders that Picard may have a legal claim to the real estate after a lawsuit seeking to recover about $255 million from the Madoff family is resolved.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris' $270 million lawsuit against an alleged beneficiary of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme is set for a court hearing today in New York, soon after a similar action went unchallenged, Bloomberg News reported today. Madoff trustee Irving Picard asked a federal judge to stop Harris' suit against Stanley Chais' estate, saying that only the trustee can collect money for Madoff's Ponzi victims. Harris, like New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in asserting a right to pursue local wrongdoing, contends that her suit can proceed because she is using her state policing power to protect consumers from fraud.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission reviewed operations at Peregrine Financial Group Inc. at least twice since 2006 without detecting the fraud that led to the collapse of the futures broker and a $200 million shortfall in client funds, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Washington, D.C.-based agency conducted examinations at Peregrine in 2007 and 2008, according to a list of CFTC reviews obtained through a public records request. The list, which includes reviews between 2006 and Nov. 9, 2011, does not detail what records or procedures examiners evaluated. A third review was listed in 2011. A CFTC official said that the 2011 exam was scheduled to oversee compliance with foreign exchange regulations but did not take place because of limited resources. Gary Gensler, CFTC chairman, is scheduled to testify today at the Senate Agriculture Committee, which has jurisdiction over the agency. The CFTC sued Peregrine over the shortfall on July 10, less than a year after being scolded for poor oversight following the collapse of MF Global Holdings Ltd., which left an estimated $1.6 billion gap in customer funds.

Former New York Mets outfielder Lenny Dykstra pleaded guilty to looting valuables from his $18 million mansion and secretly selling them after his bankruptcy filing in 2009, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. Dykstra pleaded guilty to three counts of bankruptcy fraud, concealment of bankruptcy property, and money laundering at a hearing yesterday in federal court in Los Angeles. He faces as long as 20 years in prison.

Former top executives of a failed U.S. bank in Norfolk, Va., have been indicted by a federal grand jury on bank fraud and other charges for hiding loan losses in a scheme that allegedly led to the bank's demise, Reuters reported yesterday. Edward J. Woodard, former Chief Executive of Bank of the Commonwealth, was among those charged. He led the bank for more than three decades before being forced to retire in December 2010, prosecutors said. Bank of the Commonwealth, which once had $1.3 billion in assets, failed in 2011, costing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp an estimated $268 million, prosecutors said. The indictment alleges many of the bank's loans were made without regard to industry standards, and by 2008 its losses and foreclosed properties were ballooning. Insiders then hid the bank's troubles out of fear its declining health would hurt investor and customer confidence, according to the indictment.

U.S. Bank is being examined by investigators in relation to its role in overseeing client funds allegedly misappropriated by Peregrine Financial Group Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported today. The failed brokerage maintained an account holding client funds at a U.S. Bank branch near its headquarters in Cedar Falls, Iowa, according to court filings, and authorities are examining whether Peregrine Chief Executive Russell Wasendorf Sr. supplied fake bank documents to auditors in order to mask illicit use of his clients' money. Wasendorf is at the center of a probe into the futures and currency brokerage, which filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday after regulators uncovered what they called "missing" funds and alleged fraud.

In related news, the U.S. Trustee Program yesterday named a new trustee in Peregrine Financial Group Inc.'s bankruptcy case, according to the Wall Street Journal today. Ira Bodenstein of Shaw Gussis Fishman Glantz Wolfson & Towbin LLC said that he has accepted the appointment. He now is in charge of unwinding the Cedar Falls, Iowa, brokerage firm—whose clients' accounts were frozen this week amid a suspected $215 million shortfall in customer accounts.

Court documents showed that two investors failed in their private bids to recover more than $10 million from fund manager J. Ezra Merkin for money lost in Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, Reuters reported yesterday. Last month, Merkin agreed to pay $410 million to settle a lawsuit brought by New York state that accused Merkin of secretly steering client money to Madoff. Madoff pleaded guilty in March 2009 to perpetrating the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history and is serving a 150-year prison sentence.

U.S. District Judge Robert Wilkins on Tuesday ruled that the Securities Investor Protection Corp. is not required to begin a claims process in Texas for the victims of R. Allen Stanford’s $7 billion investment fraud, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Judge Wilkins said that regulators failed to show that the 7,000 brokerage clients who invested in the Ponzi scheme are entitled to have their losses covered by SIPC, a nonprofit corporation funded by the brokerage industry. The Securities and Exchange Commission told SIPC on June 15, 2001, to start a process that could grant as much as $500,000 for each Stanford client -- the same maximum amount it offers in any case. After SIPC balked, the SEC for the first time sued the congressionally chartered group.

The 3½-year-old federal investigation of the Madoff Ponzi scheme is taking a new direction amid the expected guilty plea today of Bernard Madoff's younger brother, Peter, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Prosecutors now are expected to shift their focus to Shana Madoff, Peter Madoff's daughter. Shana Madoff, who now goes by her married name, Shana Swanson, served as the firm's in-house counsel and compliance director. The new focus comes after authorities have had a tough time building a criminal case that Bernard Madoff's relatives knowingly participated in the multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Madoff, who pleaded guilty to the fraud in early 2009, has said that his relatives did not know anything about it, and investigators do not appear to have found records showing otherwise. But prosecutors appear to be getting traction with easier-to-prove charges like making false statements to investors and government agencies.