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One of five former Bernard Madoff aides on trial for abetting his massive Ponzi scheme will face two fewer counts when the case goes to a jury, after a judge agreed to throw out charges that he arranged for his son to get a no-show job at the firm, Reuters reported on Saturday. In an opinion filed on Friday, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain granted Daniel Bonventre's motion to dismiss the counts, which charged him with violating federal law by causing false documents to be filed with the Department of Labor. However, Swain denied motions from Bonventre and from two other defendants, portfolio manager Annette Bongiorno and Joann Crupi, to dismiss a number of other counts related to alleged tax violations.

A former Bernard Madoff executive on trial for aiding his $17 billion Ponzi scheme should be barred from calling a witness on “corporate psychopaths” to claim he was relentlessly manipulated, prosecutors said, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Paul Babiak, described by a defense lawyer as “one of the world’s leading experts on corporate psychopaths,” shouldn’t be allowed to testify for Daniel Bonventre, the ex-operations chief of Madoff’s broker-dealer unit, because he’s never met Madoff or diagnosed him, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Schwartz said in a filing yesterday in Manhattan federal court. Babiak, an author and licensed psychologist, can’t “reliably diagnose Mr. Madoff as a psychopath and testify about his skills in manipulating those around him on the basis of news reports and YouTube videos,” Schwartz wrote.

A bankruptcy judge yesterday approved JPMorgan Chase & Co's $543 million deal to end two private lawsuits stemming from its relationship with convicted Ponzi scheme mastermind Bernard Madoff, Reuters reported today. A spokeswoman for the trustee liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC confirmed that Bankruptcy Judge Stuart Bernstein approved the agreement, which was made public on January 7, the same day federal authorities announced the bank had agreed to pay more than $2 billion to settle criminal charges related to the Madoff fraud. JPMorgan will pay $218 million to resolve class-action litigation and $325 million to resolve claims brought by the trustee Irving Picard.

U.S. officials said that Bank of America Corp.’s Countrywide unit should pay the maximum of $2.1 billion in penalties for selling defective mortgage loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff is considering how much to penalize the bank following months of arguments over the size of the civil fine that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America should pay in the first mortgage-fraud case brought by the U.S. to go trial. The bank has claimed it should have to pay $1.1 million at most. “To punish defendants for their culpability and bad faith, and to deter financial institutions and their executives who would engage in similar fraudulent mortgage schemes, the court should impose the maximum penalty,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a court filing yesterday. Countrywide is still a defendant in a securities fraud case brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, over billions of dollars in residential mortgage-based securities. Bank of America and Countrywide also face $10 billion in claims by American International Group Inc. over mortgage securities.

Bernard Madoff victims who withdrew more money from the con man’s firm than they invested — and were slated for no recovery — asked to be excluded from JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s $543 million settlement of lawsuits over the fraud so they can sue the bank on their own, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. A group of 193 investors said in a court filing on Tuesday that the accord between JPMorgan and Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Madoff’s defunct company, doesn’t cover “net winners.” They asked for court permission to not be part of the settlement. The group’s lawyer, Helen Davis Chaitman of Becker & Poliakoff LLP in New York, said she intends to file a new lawsuit on behalf of these and other victims who say they were harmed in Madoff’s $17 billion Ponzi scheme, even though they didn’t lose their principal.

The Bernard Madoff aide who ran his investment advisory business had seven personal accounts with purported balances totaling almost $70 million when the firm collapsed, far more than she was paid, a jury was told, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Annette Bongiorno, hired by Madoff in 1968, when she was 19, earned a total of $3.91 million during the period from 1993 to 2008, the only years that documentation for her salary was available, Jason Wake, a Federal Bureau of Investigation forensic accountant, testified yesterday in Manhattan federal court in the trial of five ex-members of Madoff’s inner circle. The trial, which started in October, is the first stemming from Madoff’s $17 billion Ponzi scheme, which collapsed after his confession and arrest in December 2008. Bongiorno and four other former Madoff employees are accused of aiding the fraud for decades and getting rich in the process.

Some of Bernard Madoff’s victims won permission to appeal a bankruptcy ruling directly to a federal appeals court that barred them from using the length of time they invested with the con man to add interest to their claims, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The victims “satisfied the criteria” for a direct appeal that skips over the district court, where bankruptcy appeals usually go first, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York ruled today. A hearing date wasn’t set. The victims seek a larger share of about $1.4 billion in cash reserves set aside for the dispute by Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Madoff’s firm to repay thousands of investors who lost $17 billion in principal when the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme collapsed on Dec. 11, 2008.

A former “key” Bernard Madoff executive accused of aiding the con man’s $17 billion Ponzi scheme had his son added to the investment company’s payroll even though he didn’t work there, a jury was told, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Craig Kugel, who pleaded guilty in June 2012 to a tax scheme that gave salaries and benefits to people who weren’t employees, testified today in federal court in Manhattan that the son of Daniel Bonventre, Madoff’s operations chief, was listed as an employee so he could keep receiving company health insurance after graduating from college. At a meeting in 2007 between Kugel and Madoff’s brother Peter Madoff, another executive at the firm, “Bernie Madoff walked in and interrupted me and said Daniel Bonventre had asked him how his son could” stay on the plan and that the elder Bonventre was a “key employee,” Kugel said. “He said, ‘We need to help him out and do something for his son.’” The trial is the first stemming from the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme, which collapsed after Madoff’s arrest on Dec. 11, 2008. Bonventre and four other former Madoff employees are accused of aiding his fraud for decades and getting rich in the process. Kugel is among six of their former colleagues who have pleaded guilty and are testifying against them.

The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York has announced that Judge Stuart M. Bernstein will take over the wind-down of Bernard Madoff’s investment firm amid the unexpected death of Judge Burton Lifland, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The case has been ongoing since December 2008, and with the recently announced J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. settlement, more than 55% of funds lost in the $17.5 billion Ponzi scheme have been recovered.

A federal appeals court ruled that two former investors with Bernard Madoff cannot pursue claims against the estate of a Florida businessman who was one of the convicted swindler's biggest clients, Reuters reported yesterday. The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is a victory for Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Madoff's firm, in a battle over his authority to reach settlements on behalf of victims of Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Picard reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the estate of Jeffry Picower in 2010, the largest such settlement on behalf of victims of Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The trustee has said that Picower, who drowned in 2009, knew or should have known that Madoff was operating a fraud. About $5 billion was to go to the estate of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC and $2.2 billion was to be forfeited to the U.S. government. Picower's widow at the time said she "absolutely confident" her husband was not complicit.