Still sore over losing his lawsuit against the owners of the New York Mets, the trustee charged with cleaning up Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme warned that upholding the Mets’ victory would allow Madoff’s family to keep $82.3 million in phony profits.
In September, Manhattan federal court judge Jed Rakoff tossed nine of 11 counts brought by the trustee, Irving Picard, against Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz, and limited him to clawing back money withdrawn by the two to the two years prior to Madoff coming clean.
The two-year cap severely limits the amount Picard can recover from the businessmen to $386 million, and has become a sore point for the trustee, who was seeking $1 billion from the team owners.
Since the Mets ruling, Picard has argued that clawbacks should go back at least six years, saying the two-year rule could reduce monies collected for victims by $6 billion.
His latest salvo on the issue came this week in a separate case also before Rakoff, when the trustee said in a filing that the two-year rule would result in Madoff’s family getting rich off the jailbird’s scheme.
Under the six-year rule, the family would have to give back a total of $141 million, Picard’s legal team said in a filing against Madoff investor James Greiff.
A two-year statute would require the family to return just $58.6 million.
If the two-year statute is applied “to all transactions, Madoff’s family members could retain an extra $82,368,096 of other investors’ money,” the Picard team said in the filing.