Irish fund reaches $687m settlement with Bernie Madoff victims
New York — The Irish investment fund that helped open a floodgate of European cash for Bernard Madoff’s bogus securities firm in the early 1990s agreed to pay $687m to victims of the fraud to resolve a trustee’s lawsuit — the biggest settlement in the case in six years. The deal was struck with Dublin-based Thema International Fund, part of a web of offshore entities linked to Austrian banker Sonja Kohn, an old friend of Madoff’s, and the Benbassat family of Swiss investment professionals. They gave Madoff vital access to cash as his Ponzi scheme began to lose steam, the trustee, New York attorney Irving Picard, has said. Details of the accord were filed on Wednesday with US Bankruptcy Judge Stuart Bernstein in Manhattan. An approval hearing is scheduled for October 25. The deal will boost total recoveries for victims to about $12.7bn, or about 72c for every dollar in principal that was wiped out by the fraud. Picard is still recovering large amounts of money for thousands of victim...
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