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Judge Approves Liquidation of Madoff Feeder Funds
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By DIANA B. HENRIQUES
Published: July 21, 2009
A judge in the British Virgin Islands has approved the liquidation of the Fairfield Sentry funds, which were the largest conduits for cash flowing into the hands of Bernard L. Madoff and his global Ponzi scheme.
ruling on Tuesday cleared the way for the fund’s investors to pursue legal claims against the Fairfield Greenwich Group and its affiliates, which advised and marketed the funds worldwide.
The global breadth of the group’s funds — and the success of copycat funds sponsored by other financial entities — expanded Mr. Madoff’s reach beyond the United States into wealthy enclaves in Europe, Latin America and the Persian Gulf. Lawsuits assert that the group collected as much as $500 million in fees from fund investors.
When Mr. Madoff was arrested in December, the Sentry funds, regarded as one of the so-called feeder funds, had more than $7.2 billion invested in his spurious investment advisory operation. He has since pleaded guilty and is serving a 150-year jail term.
According to the court application in Road Town, Tortola, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, the funds now have less than $70 million, all of it subject to ownership disputes and most of it frozen by a court in the Netherlands. Fairfield Greenwich Group did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Although Fairfield Greenwich is based in New York, its flagship funds were incorporated in 1990 under the mutual fund statutes of the British Virgin Islands and technically are under the control of local directors there.
This year, lawyers acting for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, a law firm representing investors, sought the liquidation of the funds, arguing that management had been “effectively paralyzed and its business destroyed.†Their actions have left no potential assets except legal claims against others including the fund’s directors and management, the lawyers argued.
On Tuesday, Justice Edward Alexander Bannister granted the request to liquidate, according to Stuart Singer, a partner with the Boies firm. The order was “an important step toward the ultimate objective of returning as much money as possible to the defrauded investors,†Mr. Singer said.
Many others are pursuing claims against the Fairfield Greenwich Group, its partners or its offshore affiliates.
Besides lawsuits by individual investors, the group has also been sued by Irving H. Picard, the trustee liquidating Mr. Madoff’s brokerage business for the benefit of his victims. If Mr. Picard’s lawsuit is successful, he would become one of the fund’s unsecured creditors in the liquidation proceeding in the British Virgin Islands.
David J. Sheehan, chief counsel to the trustee, said Tuesday that the appointment of a liquidator “should facilitate productive discussions†over the conflicting claims surrounding the Fairfield Sentry funds.
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