Paris Prosecutors Are Asked to Seize Madoff Home on the Riviera

/Home/Madoff Trustee Actions

Paris Prosecutors Are Asked to Seize Madoff Home on the Riviera


By Heather Smith

April 27 (Bloomberg) -- Paris prosecutors are reviewing a request to seize Bernard Madoff’s home in the French Riviera filed by a woman who lost money in the New Yorker’s Ponzi scheme, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors’ office said.

“We received the request and are studying it,” Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors’ office, said in a telephone interview today.

The prosecutors’ office opened a preliminary investigation in January into criminal claims that French investors had been cheated out of their money by Madoff-linked funds. The inquiry is on-going, Montagne said today.

Madoff, 70, is in jail after pleading guilty March 12 to defrauding investors. He faces as much as a 150-year sentence for using money from new investors to pay off old ones in a global fraud that ran from at least the early 1990s. His sentencing is scheduled for June 16.

The woman’s lawyer, Jean Reinhart, didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

To contact the reporter on this story: Heather Smith in Paris at