$860M deal struck by Madoff trustee

The trustee liquidating Bernard Madoff's defunct investment-advisory business said he had reached an $860 million settlement with a pair of offshore funds that shunted money to the con man's company for years.

Irving Picard reached the accord with the liquidators for Kingate Global Fund Ltd. and Kingate Euro Fund Ltd., he said in a statement Wednesday. The arrangement essentially forces the funds to use their recoveries from the Madoff bankruptcy case to finance the settlement.

The $860 million covers 93% of the withdrawals made by the Kingate funds from their accounts at Madoff's New York firm, Picard said. The trustee has used similar litigation to recover more than $13 billion for thousands of victims who invested directly with Madoff.

The Kingate funds were founded in the British Virgin Islands in 1994 by two Italian investment advisers operating out of London. Picard sued the funds a decade ago, not long after Madoff's $20 billion Ponzi scheme collapsed. Among Madoff's biggest offshore "feeder" funds, they had invested about $1.7 billion with Madoff for their clients and lost about $750 million when the scam unraveled.

Business on 07/18/2019

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