This is just slightly south of the entire settlement package of the Foreclosure Fraud settlement, which is also nilch for the acts committed.
Reuters-
Former customers of Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme filed a class action lawsuit on Monday seeking to recover $19 billion from JPMorgan Chase & Co, claiming the bank willfully ignored signs of fraud.
JPMorgan was Madoff’s bank for two decades. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, claims the bank was “thoroughly complicit” in concealing Madoff’s fraud.
All told, Harry Markopolos would rather not be the star of this new documentary. Not in 2011. If he had his way, his big film moment would have come a decade ago.
But here he is, featured in the upcoming film, “Chasing Madoff.”
The investment manager turned financial investigator, whose tireless research uncovered the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme, the biggest such scheme in American history, insists that he was ignored by the SEC and other government officials for years despite his massive catalog of evidence.
Madoff said: “JPMorgan doesn’t have a chance in hell of not coming up with a big settlement.”
“I am not a banker but I know that $100bn going in and out of a bank account is something that should alert you to something.”
“JPMorgan got all the financial statements.”
“There were senior people at the bank who knew what was going on,” he emphasized, without naming anyone. There will be a big interview with Madoff in this weekend’s Financial Times.
JPMorgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon is tall. He’s fit. For a banker, he’s nice-looking. And he’s got that head of fluffy white, unbankerish hair. You could argue that Dimon’s single greatest asset is that he doesn’t look like Dick Fuld. Fuld, the former C.E.O. of Lehman Brothers, is a virtual Thomas Nast caricature of the venal banker; all that is missing is the stovepipe hat and the mustache-twirling. Because of his looks, Fuld has probably had a rougher ride of it over the past two and a half years. And because of his looks, Dimon has probably had too easy a ride. While Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein became a piñata for legislators and the press, Dimon fully embraced his role as Wall Street’s fair-haired boy—or “America’s Least-Hated Banker,” as The New York Times Magazine put it just last December.
1. Citi’s “Due Diligence” And Early Discovery Of The Risks Of Possible Fraud
61. During the course of Citi’s 2005 initial “due diligence,” and as part of negotiating the final terms of the Prime Fund loan transaction, Citi learned, among other things, that Tremont received only paper copy trade confirmations approximately five (5) days conducted the alleged trading – a practice rife with the possibility for fraud due to the ability of the brokerage firm to backdate or manufacture trading activity with no ability on the customer’s part to check that the trades actually took place.
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.”
Amended Complaint against all defendants / Complaint against JPMorgan Chase & Co., JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, J.P. Morgan Securities Ltd. [Redacted] (related document(s) 1 ) Filed by Deborah H. Renner on behalf of Irving H. Picard, Trustee for the Liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. (Renner, Deborah) (Entered: 02/03/2011)
NEW YORK — One of Bernard Madoff’s sons was found dead of an apparent suicide Saturday on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest, according to a law enforcement official.
Mark Madoff, 46, was found hanged in his apartment in Manhattan’s fashionable SoHo section, according to the official. A family member notified police around 7:30 a.m.
The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Mark Madoff and his brother, Andrew, were under investigation but hadn’t faced any criminal charges in the massive Ponzi scheme that led to their father’s jailing.
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