On Thursday, a court-appointed trustee said that the victims from the Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme will receive an additional $2.5 billion back from their stolen funds.
Irving Picard, the trustee in charge of recovering assets, said that on Wednesday, checks had been mailed to 1,230 investors who had been ripped off by Madoff.
The payments were wide ranging from $1,784 to as high as $526.8 million; an average payment is $2 million, reported CNN.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Burton Lifland in Manhattan had been the one to authorize the latest distribution.
They follow almost $1.15 billion worth of payments, some coming from the Securities Investor Protection Corp., that had been sent out in August. This came after Picard had two victories this summer.
The total of funds now recovered and disbursed to the many victims has a total of more than $3.6 billion. Wednesday’s news affects an additional 182 victims that have now been satisfied or a total of 1,074 investor accounts have now been reimbursed, according to CNN.
Rewind a few months back and according to Reuters, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court had a lower court decision stand that supported Picard’s formula for calculating losses. In the following month, a former Madoff customer dropped a $7.2 billion forfeiture court challenge by the estate of Madoff investor Jeffry Picower.
From that amount, $5 billion would go to the Madoff firm’s estate; the remainder goes to the U.S. government.
Overall, Picard has recovered $9.15 billion (53 percent) from the $17.3 billion that he thinks has been lost from Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
In addition, he has been keeping some funds in reserve while Bernard Madoff victims have been pursuing individual cases to get additional money back.
For additional distributions, Picard said current litigation is delaying things. He is also appealing court decisions that have put a limit on his claims against banks that conducted business with Bernard Madoff. This includes JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM).
According to Joseph Sarachek, managing director of claims trading at CRT Capital Group LLC, he said the market for trading claims on possible recoveries from Madoff’s estate will adjust for the distribution and while they recently traded around 69 cents to the dollar, soon it will probably trade in 30s.
Saracheck said, “The Madoff market is fairly volatile. The real question is when people think the next distribution will be.”
Picard and his law firm, Baker & Hostetler, had been given the green light by Lifland to bill $321.2 million in of legal fees for pursuing Bernard Madoff cases under the period ending January 31, 2012.
But there’s more. Not all investors have been made whole. There’s still 1,048 of them are waiting to get back stolen funds.
In total, about $17.3 billion had been lost from Madoff’s pyramid scheme. The scam came to an end when Madoff had been arrested on Dec. 11, 2008.
