More than five years after financier Bernard Madoff was
arrested for masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in United States history,
Yeshiva University continues to reel from its $100 million loss, Bloomberg News
reported on Wednesday.
According to Bloomberg, the New York-based university has
warned its budget deficits may get worse, and it failed to produce a financial
report on time for the year ending June 30, 2013 – prompting Moody’s Investors
Service to cut the school's rating to B1 this month.
That makes Yeshiva "the only university with an
endowment of more than $1 billion that [Moody's] ranks as junk," Bloomberg
noted, adding that Yeshiva’s mark in 2008, prior to the Madoff scandal, was the
third-highest grade.
Moody's said that the university has had trouble controlling
operating costs and has delayed implementing system-wide accounting practices.
It has also angered faculty by introducing salary freezes at
a time when its president, Richard Joel, earns well more than $1 million per
year. Joel did, however, agree to a symbolic $100,000 pay cut.
Yeshiva's annual deficits totaled hundreds of millions of
dollars from 2010 to 2012, according to Bloomberg News. In 2010, its deficit
was $107.5 million, while in 2011 it stood at $46.7 million and in 2012 it was
$105.9 million.
Madoff, 75, who stepped down from the Yeshiva University
board, is currently serving a 150-year prison term for the $65 billion scheme
that affected some 4,800 clients, including private clients, numerous Jewish
educational institutions and non-profits.
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