FierceFinanceFierceFinanceITFierceCompliance IT   FierceCIO

Madoff investigators face challenges

Tools
Tags
prosecutors
cooperation
Bloomberg
Bernie Madoff

Bloomberg reports that a month after arresting Bernard Madoff, investigators are still struggling to figure out how exactly he ran his scheme for so long. You can imagine the mountain of documents that must be sifted through. One key issue is whether Madoff is indeed cooperating. Madoff's attorney tells Bloomberg he is, and apparently there was a meeting recently.

But there hasn't been enough cooperation that prosecutors were willing to cut Madoff some slack after he sent out millions worth of jewelry to friends and family. They are demanding he be held in jail. My sense is that there is still a lot of posturing going on, a lot of anger and gamesmanship on both sides. If he was fully cooperating, unwinding the scheme ought to be easy; he'd just tell them how he did everything. It may be that Madoff is being less than fully forthcoming and the investigators are none too pleased.

For more:
- here's the article

Related Articles:
Madoff news from FierceFinance

Comments

1. What's the incentive for him to cooperate??, Certainly not to avoid bail being revoked, as there's no legal precedent for revoking bail, other than a compelling argument that he poses a flight risk. His plane is in the shop, and he isn't going to fly commercial. 2. He's not going to be sentenced to jail for at least a year. Add another 3-4 months before he actually has to surrender himself. Based on federal guidelines, and notwithstanding that Judges can veer from the guidelines, the anticipated sentence is going to be at least 10 years. Unless he's going to point fingers at multiple co-conspirators, any reduction in sentence based on 'cooperation' is going to shave off no more than 12 months, if that. No judge, even if the venue were moved to Iowa, where nobody was victimized, is going to impose a sentence of less than 10 years.
3. So why would he cooperate? Its not like he's going to point anyone to where he's got a stash of gold bars or a crate full of diamonds that he might have accumulated over the years.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

More information about formatting options

To combat spam, please enter the code in the image.