In total, payouts to Madoff victims now amount to around $19 billion. The total amount reported missing from client accounts, including fictitious gains, was nearly $65 billion.
Richard Breeden, former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and overseer of the Madoff Victim Fund, on Monday announced a final payout of $131.4 million to 23,408 claimants, completing the distribution of all available forfeited assets.
“Our objective was to find all of the victims, and know what everybody lost, to deploy the assets we had in the fairest and most equitable way,” Breeden said in an interview. “Nobody got left behind.”
On June 29, 2009, Bernard Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum penalty allowed. He passed away on April 14, 2021, at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, due to complications from chronic kidney disease.
The Madoff investment scandal defrauded thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. While Bernard Madoff claimed his Ponzi scheme began in the early 1990s, a former trader testified in court that fraudulent record-keeping had been occurring since the early 1970s.
When the fund, established by the U.S. Department of Justice, closes in 2025, approximately 38,860 victims—including individuals, schools, charities, and pension plans—will have recovered an average of 93.71% of their verified losses.
Additionally, Irving Picard, the trustee responsible for liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC after its 2008 bankruptcy, has recovered $14.72 billion for the firm’s customers.
Unlike Picard, Breeden also distributed funds to indirect victims, including those who invested through “feeder” funds. Claimants from 127 countries received compensation.
The fund was primarily established through settlements between the U.S. Justice Department and Bernard Madoff’s former bank, JPMorgan Chase, as well as between the liquidator of Madoff’s former firm and the estate of Jeffry Picower, a former Madoff investor.
The trustee for Madoff’s liquidation assets filed at the end of 2015 an NIS 367 million ($100 million) lawsuit against several academic and healthcare regulators in Israel, demanding the return of funds that he said were “illegally received at the expense of innocent victims.”
“Where many lost and reached the point of poverty in old age, others – including respected and leading research and educational institutions in Israel – received significant amounts of stolen funds illegally,” the trustee told an Israeli court.
Among the defendants were the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben Gurion University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the universities of Bar Ilan, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and the Technion. In addition, the lawsuit also targeted the Ichilov Medical Center in Tel Aviv, Sheba, Rambam, Schneider, Kaplan hospitals, and the Clalit HMO.
