New York - The trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Bernard Madoff’s investment firm sued the Austrian banker Sonja Kohn for $19.6 billion on Friday, accusing her of helping to prop up his decades-long Ponzi scheme.
On the eve of the second anniversary of the revelation that Bernard Madoff had committed the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, the court-appointed trustee of Madoff’s investment firm filed his biggest, and perhaps last, lawsuit.
Irving Picard filed a massive civil racketeering lawsuit on Friday seeking $19.6 billion against Austrian banker Sonja Kohn and her Bank Medici, along with UniCredit, Bank Austria and others. The price tag of the lawsuit is so big because racketeering damages can be trebled.
Picard, who has been working closely with federal prosecutors, said in a press release that Kohn masterminded a “23-year criminal relationship with Bernard Madoff” and that Kohn, Bank Medici and the other banks sued in the lawsuit played an “indispensible role in facilitating the Ponzi scheme.” Picard claims that more than $9 billion of the Ponzi scheme’s stolen money is directly attributable to Kohn and the banks with which she conspired.
“In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own,” Picard said in a statement that contained the harshest words Picard has used in his two-year quest to recover funds for some of Madoff’s victims. “We believe that even more information regarding the full scope of this criminal enterprise will be revealed.”
Amid the stunning accusations, Picard claims that Madoff kept records of accounts at his Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities that were used to secretly pay at least $62 million of kickbacks to Kohn. Picard also claimed that Madoff, who has maintained that he acted alone, destroyed his records attributable to Kohn before he confessed to running a Ponzi scheme on December 11, 2008, but that certain former employees kept copies of the records.
The 157-page complaint, filed in Manhattan’s federal bankruptcy court, describes Kohn, a 62-year-old Orthodox Jewish grandmother, as being a central player in the Madoff scam ever since the two met in New York around 1985. Picard says she established Bank Medici in Austria as a mechanism of shoveling investor money into the Ponzi scheme.
According to the court filing, Kohn helped funnel $9.1 billion of investor cash into the fraud through feeder funds and that her supposed banking operation was legitimized by its relationship with Bank Austria, a unit of big financial firm UniCredit, which received at least $31 million and 25% of Bank Medici.
In recent days Picard has sued big banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co., HSBC and UBS in multi-billion dollar lawsuits. The banks deny any wrongdoing and JPMorgan accused Picard of acting irresponsibly in an effort to generate headlines. Picard has been rushing to the courthouse to file lawsuits and beat a Saturday deadline.
So he said. The paper never refused the ink.
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