Looks like we have two lawsuits now....
The trustee liquidating Bernard Madoff’s former investment firm sued JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $6.4 billion over claims the bank aided and abetted the imprisoned con man’s fraud.
“JPMorgan was willfully blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff,” David J. Sheehan, counsel to Picard, said in the statement. “JPMC was at the very center of that fraud, and thoroughly complicit in it.”
Heh heh..... and now we have this:
Picard alleges HSBC helped funnel more than $8.9 billion to Madoff through a dozen so-called feeder funds based in Europe, the Caribbean and Central America. He also says it ignored warnings from its own accountants that his phenomenal investment record was suspect.
Oh, a little offshore game-playing is being alleged is it?
It's getting a bit warm in Bankersville...... while the Banksters may be able to bribe Congress, it's a bit harder to deal with the court system.
The wheels of justice do grind slowly, but their grinding is inexorable, especially when there are people with funds and a grudge on the other side of the courtroom. As with the circumstances surrounding so-called "Mortgage-Backed Securities" (which may not have actual mortgages in them) I suspect these cases, along with the others that Picard has filed (there are several more) ought to prove most-interesting in the coming months and years.
Remember, in a civil lawsuit you only need to prove preponderance of the evidence - if he's got evidence that the banks ignored their own risk departments who questioned the authenticity of Madoff's scheme (and it appears, from the reporting, that he says he does) these banks could be cooked.
I'll be watching developments in these cases very closely.
