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Prosecutors said that Peter Madoff, the brother of convicted Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernard L. Madoff, will plead guilty on June 29 to two federal charges as part of the U.S. investigation of the fraud, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Peter Madoff will admit to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and one count of falsifying records and has agreed to forfeit $143.1 billion, a prosecutor said in a letter yesterday to U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain. Peter Madoff was chief compliance officer at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. Bernard Madoff is serving 150 years in prison after pleading guilty to orchestrating the fraud that destroyed his New York-based firm, which collapsed in December 2008.

The liquidator of Bernard Madoff's firm is barred by state and federal laws from taking back money invested with a brokerage, almost 300 defendants told U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff in court papers, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Madoff's customers are entitled to interest, damages and opportunity costs in addition to their principal, and can keep deposits made in the two years before the con man's Ponzi scheme collapsed, according to the joint brief filed in federal court. Judge Rakoff has allowed trustee Irving Picard to try to claw back fake profits received by investors during the two-year period. The defendants range from ABN Amro Bank NV and Nomura Holdings Inc. affiliates to the trustee liquidating former Madoff investor Ezra Merkin’s hedge funds and accountant Frank Avellino.

Lenny Dykstra, the former star New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies outfielder, entered a plea agreement with federal prosecutors who accused him of defrauding creditors by declaring bankruptcy and then looting his $18 million mansion, Reuters reported yesterday. The government filed the sealed plea agreement yesterday with the federal court in Los Angeles, court records show. Terms were not immediately available. Dykstra was sentenced in March to a three-year prison term after he pleaded no contest to grand theft auto charges. He was sentenced the following month to a 270-day term after entering a no contest plea to charges of lewd conduct and assault with a deadly weapon. A trial in the bankruptcy fraud case had been scheduled for July 24, court records show.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said that money manager Ezra Merkin has agreed to pay $410 million to settle a lawsuit brought by New York state that accused Merkin of secretly steering client money to Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, Reuters reported yesterday. Under the agreement, Merkin will pay $405 million to compensate investors over three years, Schneiderman's office said. The other $5 million will go to the state. Investors may receive over 40 percent of their losses, Schneiderman's office said, and those who did not know Merkin was sending their money to Madoff will get more. The settlement does not resolve a separate case brought against Merkin by Irving Picard, the trustee seeking money for all of Madoff's victims. Picard is trying to claw back $500 million that Merkin and his funds withdrew from accounts with Madoff.

Milwaukee-based Quarles & Brady will pay $26.5 million and Greenberg Traurig will pay $61 million to settle a lawsuit against the two firms that accused them of assisting in an Arizona Ponzi scheme that cost investors $900 million, according to a Reuters report, BizTimes.com reported yesterday. Quarles & Brady's settlement received preliminary approval from U.S. District Judge Frederick Martone. The settlements, disclosed in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, would end class action lawsuits that arose out of the alleged fraud and failure of Mortgages Ltd. Greenberg Traurig had advised the Arizona-based lender prior to its 2008 bankruptcy filing, while Quarles & Brady was counsel to Radical Bunny LLC, which helped finance Mortgages Ltd.

Nearly $34 million is to be repaid by GE Capital, Fredrikson & Byron and the John T. Petters Foundation, the StarTribune (Minneapolis) reported yesterday. Court approval of three "false profit" and fraudulent-transfer settlements were granted Wednesday, providing the Petters corporate bankruptcy estate with nearly $34 million, bringing to $300 million the amount recovered since the business enterprises of the convicted Wayzata businessman were placed in bankruptcy in late 2008. But the bankruptcy proceeding that stems from the $3.65 billion Ponzi scheme is nowhere near the finish line. Trustee Doug Kelley said that it will be "at least" two more years before all the claims in the case are resolved, including 130 more clawback claims that potentially total $1.5 billion.

A U.S. bankruptcy judge barred a class action lawsuit filed in Florida against the estate of former Bernard Madoff investor Jeffry Picower, Bloomberg reported today. Madoff Trustee Irving H. Picard settled a lawsuit against the Picower estate for $7.2 billion in 2010 after alleging that Picower knew of and profited from Madoff’s fraud. Pamela Goldman and a related partnership asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland to let their suit go forward, even after similar actions had been barred by Lifland and other judges on appeal, the judge said yesterday in an order filed in court. The judge’s ruling on the Florida class action may help Picard, who has been fighting to preserve his sole right to sue to recover money for the con man’s customers. Customers who have little prospect of being paid by Picard, along with other parties, say he is interfering with their rights. Picower drowned in 2009, and his estate forfeited the money to the U.S. and Picard. The Lifland ruling is on the docket of the main case: Securities Investor Protection Corp. v. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, 08-ap-1789, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

Taylor Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp.'s ex-Chairman Lee Farkas lost a bid to overturn his convictions for orchestrating a $3 billion scheme prosecutors said was among the biggest bank frauds recorded in the U.S., Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., yesterday found nothing in Farkas's trial that would warrant reversing any of his 14 convictions, rejecting arguments that he was deprived of a fair trial.

Emory Booker, an attorney who promoted himself as Milwaukee's "Light Hero," targets poor people who do not understand bankruptcy laws, Chief Bankruptcy Judge Pamela Pepper said on Tuesday, fining him $5,000 for overcharging clients and other violations, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported yesterday. The sanction is in addition to more than $7,500 that Booker has been ordered to repay clients, a figure that is growing almost daily. On Tuesday, Bankruptcy Judge Margaret Dee McGarity also ordered Booker to refund $529 to two clients.

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.