by Allan Dodds Frank

The allegations unveiled Thursday by the trustee amount to accusing the senior management of the bank (without naming anyone) of ignoring the public good to protect profits—and Bernie. Back when the complaint was under seal, Picard’s No. 1 counsel David Sheehan had asserted: “JPMorgan was willfully blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff.” In his statement, Sheehan said: “JPMC was at the very center of that fraud, and thoroughly complicit in it.” At the time, the bank called the trustee “irresponsible” and said the complaint was aimed at “headline-grabbing.”

For its part, JPMorgan Chase said Thursday that the bankruptcy trustee’s complaint is “based on distortions of both the relevant facts and the governing law. Contrary to the trustee’s allegation, JPMorgan did not know about or in any way become a party to the fraud orchestrated by Bernard Madoff.”

The statement continued:

“Madoff’s firm was not an important or significant customer in the context of JPMorgan’s commercial banking business, and the revenues earned from Madoff’s bank account were modest and entirely consistent with conventional market rates and fees.” The statement added that the trustee’s claims that the bank earned big bucks from Madoff “is demonstrably false.”

The bank’s statement made no mention of the supposed First Rule of Banking: “Know Your Customer.”

My simultaneous translation of the JPMorgan statement is this: “We are such a giant global bank that whatever profits we made from Madoff are chump change. A settlement would not affect earnings, even though we have to stipulate that we administered the accounts Bernie used to carry out the largest Ponzi fraud in history, and even though we neither admit nor deny turning a blind eye to his machinations and making hundreds of millions in the process.”

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