BNP Paribas Fortis is an international bank based in Belgium and is a subsidiary of BNP Paribas. It was formerly, together with Fortis Bank Nederland, the banking arm of the financial institution Fortis. After the ultimately unsuccessful ABN-AMRO takeover, the subprime crisis and management mistakes led to the sale of the Dutch and Luxembourg parts of the banking branch to the Dutch and Luxembourg governments. Fortis Bank itself was first partly bought by the Belgian government, then fully purchased by the government and sold to BNP Paribas.
William Francis Galvin is an American politician who serves as the 27th Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth.
UniCredit S.p.A. is an international banking group headquartered in Milan. It is Italy's only systemically important bank and the world's 34th largest by assets. It was formed through the merger of Credito Italiano and Unicredito in 1998 but has a corporate identity stretching back to its first foundation in 1870 as Banca di Genova. UniCredit is listed on the Milan and Frankfurt stock exchanges, is a constituent stock of the Euro Stoxx 50 index of leading shares.
A.G. Edwards, Inc. was an American financial services holding company; its principal wholly owned subsidiary was A.G. Edwards & Sons, Inc., which operated as a full-service securities broker-dealer in the United States and Europe. The firm was acquired by Wachovia to be folded into Wachovia Securities; Wachovia was subsequently acquired by Wells Fargo, and the securities division was folded into Wells Fargo Advisors. The firm provided securities and commodities brokerage, investment banking, trust services, asset management, financial and retirement planning, private client services, investment management, and other related financial services to individual, governmental, and institutional clients.
Aozora Bank, Ltd. is a Japanese commercial bank that offers service in 19 branches in Japan and in 2 overseas representative offices.
Jacob Ezra Merkin is an American investor, hedge fund manager and philanthropist. He had been a fund manager and capital raiser until 2008 when one of the funds in Gabriel Capital LP, his $5 billion group of hedge funds became insolvent because a large portion of its assets was invested with the convicted Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff. The fallout from his investment with Madoff has been extensive. He navigated a series of lawsuits without a finding of fraud or knowledge of the scheme, but agreed to repay any fees earned from the investment in Madoff historically. He had to resign a series of positions including his role as non-executive chairman of GMAC.
Union Bancaire Privée is a private bank and wealth management firm headquartered in Geneva. UBP is one of the largest private banks in Switzerland, and serves private and institutional clients. The bank was founded in 1969 by Edgar de Picciotto.
Sonja Kohn is an Austrian banker.
Robert M. Jaffe is an American stockbroker. He was a long-time associate of Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff and promoted Madoff's fund to wealthy investors in Massachusetts and Florida.
Carl J. Shapiro was an American businessman and philanthropist. In 1939 he founded Kay Windsor, Inc. in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and built it into one of the largest women's clothing companies in the country. He was its president and chairman of the board and was director of VF Corporation, which acquired Kay Windsor in 1971; he retired five years later.
Fairfield Greenwich Group is an investment firm founded in 1983 in New York City. The firm had among the largest exposures to the Bernard Madoff fraud.
Cohmad Securities was a US company whose main business was to introduce investors to the Bernard Madoff investment company for which it received commission based on the amount invested. The company, whose name combines “Cohn” and “Madoff,” was founded in 1985 by Bernard Madoff and Maurice Cohn, Madoff’s friend and former neighbor. Its office was located at the same address as Madoff's firm, and it employed between 10 and 20 employees with annual sales between $1M and $5M.
The Madoff investment scandal was a major case of stock and securities fraud discovered in late 2008. In December of that year, Bernie Madoff, the former Nasdaq chairman and founder of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
Participants in the Madoff investment scandal included employees of Bernard Madoff's investment firm with specific knowledge of the Ponzi scheme, a three-person accounting firm that assembled his reports, and a network of feeder funds that invested their clients' money with Madoff while collecting significant fees. Madoff avoided most direct financial scrutiny by accepting investments only through these feeder funds, while obtaining false auditing statements for his firm. The liquidation trustee of Madoff's firm has implicated managers of the feeder funds for ignoring signs of Madoff's deception.
Recovery of funds from the Madoff investment scandal has been underway since the scandal broke in December 2008. That month, recovery trustee Irving Picard received funds from the Bank of New York account where Bernard Madoff held new investments into his Ponzi scheme. As it has been concluded that no legitimate investments were made on the investors' behalf for at least the last 12 years of operation, recovery has proceeded on a "money in/money out" basis. Investors are entitled to receive no more than the nominal cash amounts that they paid in and did not subsequently withdraw, without regard to inflation, interest, opportunity cost or the false statements that Madoff provided them. Those statements combined to a total balance of approximately $64 billion, while the admitted claims amount to $19.5 billion. As of March 2022, the trustee had recovered $14.6 billion toward these claims through legal action against Madoff associates, feeder funds and beneficiaries of the scheme, and had made fourteen distributions to investors. Action by the Department of Justice has recovered an additional $4 billion.
Manhattan Investment Fund was a hedge fund managed by Michael Berger, who pursued an investment strategy of betting against US stocks that appeared to be overvalued. During the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, this strategy led to about $400 million in losses on IT related products. Berger hid the losses from the investors in the fund for more than three years. This resulted in criminal charges against Berger for securities fraud.
Thema International Fund PLC, based in Dublin, Ireland, is a Dublin-listed, Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) III-certified, open-end fund incorporated in Ireland, which was launched in December 1996. It created only one sub-fund, the Thema Fund. The fund had a minimum investment requirement of $50,000.
Tremont Group Holdings, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered in Rye, New York, is a hedge fund group with a subsidiary that advised a feeder fund to Bernard Madoff's investment advisory firm in the Madoff investment scandal. This was the second-largest feeder fund to Madoff's firm due to the group having had a long professional relationship with him as Chairman of the NASD, the precursor to FINRA, and as the largest options market maker on the NASDAQ.The firm was one of the largest hedge fund consultants and advisors globally during the seminal 1990's period and pioneered a number of ground breaking products such as the CSFB Tremont Hedge Fund Index, specialized products and venues for hedge fund investment; structured products, insurance entities, new markets and jurisdictions including the first institutional fund of hedge funds in Korea and the foundation of The Bermuda Stock exchange. Prominent board members and shareholders included; Mario Gabelli of Gabelli Asset Management, Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors and Arthur Samberg of Pequot Capital Management. Tremont was among the first investors and/or involved in the launch or restructuring of numerous legendary funds such as; S.A.C., Quantum and AQR.
Aurelia Finance SA was a private bank and fund-management company in Geneva, Switzerland that was set up as a feeder fund to Bernie Madoff's illegal Ponzi scheme.
Genevalor Benbassat & Cie is an asset manager located in Geneva, Switzerland. The firm set up five European feeder funds that invested almost $2 billion into Bernie Madoff's criminal Ponzi scheme.
