Saturday, December 13, 2008

Madoff's victim list...

Word on the identities of Bernie Madoff's clients / victimes continues to emerge.

Bernie Madoff's Victims (So Far)

Tremont Capital. Fund of funds. Lost "hundreds of millions". (announced on CNBC)

Maxam Capital Management LLC. Combined loss of $280 million. "I'm wiped out," said Sandra Manzke, Maxam's founder and chairman. The Darien, Conn., fund of hedge funds will have to close as a result of the losses, she said. (WSJ)

Fairfield Greenwich Group. Bloomberg: The biggest loser may be Walter Noel’s Fairfield Greenwich Group, whose $7.3 billion Fairfield Sentry Ltd. invested with Madoff’s eponymous firm, three people familiar with the matter said... Fairfield Sentry has a record of more than 15 years with an annual return of 4 to 6 percentage points above benchmark interest rates, according to a marketing document dated this month that was prepared by Zurich-based NPB New Private Bank Ltd. On an absolute basis, returns exceeded 10 percent every year from 1991 through 2000. Since then, they ranged from 6.4 percent to 9.8 percent...The strategy is a “split-strike conversion,” where the investment manager buys shares of large U.S. companies and enters into options contracts to limit the risk, the document says.

Fix Asset Management. Bloomberg: Fix Asset Management, which had an account worth at least $400 million with Madoff Investments. The firm said it’s checking with lawyers about the holdings. “We are very shocked,” John Fix, the son of founder Charles Fix, said by phone from Greece. “We put in redemptions in the past few months and got our money back no problem. We are just so surprised about all this.”

Kingate Management Ltd. Bloomberg says $2.8 billion Kingate Global Fund Ltd. invested with Madoff.

Thyssen Family. Source sends the following:

Thybo Investments grew out of a family office for Thyssen. They have been in fund of funds it seems since 1989.

Thybo International is a "proper" fund of fund but it's newer share class G invests only in one manager - and i'm 99% sure it's Madoff as the returns are almost the same. Some more info:

  • The fund started in Jan 2007.
  • Ernst & Young. Luxembourg are the auditors.
  • UBS Luxembourg is the administrator.
  • Thybo states on their webpage: "Our track record incorporates audited financial statements at both a composite firm-wide and individual portfolios level."

Ira Roth's family. WSJ: Ira Roth, a New Jersey resident, who says his family has about $1 million invested through Mr. Madoff's firm, is "in a state of panic." He said his 86-year-old mother-in-law has been living on the investments' returns, and he has been using the funds to pay college tuition.

Sterling Equities. Fund controlled by Fred Wilpon, co-owner of the NY Mets, confirms it had money with Madoff.

Stephen Abbott, a San Francisco lawyer. WSJ: [Abbott] and two siblings had several hundred thousand dollars invested with Mr. Madoff. They inherited the trust from their father, who had befriended Mr. Madoff years ago. Performance remained steady through the current bear market, he said. "People were floored," he says. "We were making money in this lousy market." He says he is concerned about recovering the money but "you have to get philosophical about this stuff. It could be worse; we still have our health."

Unnamed European Funds of Funds: WSJ: Christopher Miller, chief executive of London hedge fund ratings agency Allenbridge Hedgeinfo, said: "Some very big investor names are involved in this. The scheme could only work if enough investors were subscribing for him to pay money out. Some of the world's biggest hedge funds have been hit by this. There will be a monumental impact for the hedge fund industry, it could be larger then Enron. "Some investors in Madoff's funds face 100% write-downs on the money they invested, they will suddenly be nursing full write-downs in December. When people realize the magnitude of this it will be fizzing around the stratosphere." One asset manager based in Switzerland, home to many high-net-worth individuals who invest in funds of hedge funds, said: "Everyone's talking about this in Geneva. Several wealthy investors could be facing big losses."

Palm Beach Country Club. Source: CNBC's David Faber

Lawrence Velvel, "69, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, said he and a friend may have lost millions of dollars between them (AP). "This is a major disaster for a lot of people," Velvel said in a telephone interview from his Andover, Mass., office. "You work all your life, you finally manage to save up something, and somebody who's entrusted with it, it turns out suddenly he's a crook. Lots of people are getting fully or partially wiped out." Velvel said he wants to know where government regulators, as well as accountants and others at Madoff's company, were when the money was being lost." (AP)

Loeb Family. Source: CNBC's David Faber

J. Ezra Merkin. GMAC LLC Chairman. WSJ: Mr. Merkin, the chairman of former General Motors Corp. financing arm GMAC, is also a money manager at Ascot Partners LLC in New York. Ascot, which had $1.8 billion under management as of Sept. 30, had substantially all of its assets invested with Mr. Madoff, according to a letter to Mr. Merkin sent to clients Thursday night. Mr. Merkin said as one of the largest investors in Ascot, he believed he had personally "suffered major losses from this catastrophe."

Norman Braman. Former Philadelphia Eagles owner

Richard Spring. WSJ: A Boca Raton resident and former securities analyst, says he had about $11 million -- or 95% of his net worth -- invested with Mr. Madoff. "That's how much I believed in him," Mr. Spring said.

Members of half-a-dozen country clubs: WSJ: "Mr. Madoff tapped social networks in Dallas, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis. In Minnesota, he attracted investors from Hillcrest Golf Club of St. Paul and Oak Ridge Country Club in Hopkins, investors say. One of them estimated that investors from the two clubs may have invested more than $100 million combined. One of the largest clusters of Madoff investors was in Florida, where losses could be substantial. Mr. Madoff relied on a network of friends, family and business colleagues to attract investors. According to investors and agents, some of these agents were paid commissions for harvesting investors. Others had separate, lucrative business relationships with Mr. Madoff. "If you were eating lunch at the club or golfing, everyone was always talking about how Madoff was making them all this money," one investor says. "Everyone wanted to sign up." Jeff Fischer, a top divorce attorney in Palm Beach, says many of his clients were also Mr. Madoff's clients. "Every big divorce that came through my office had portfolio positions with Madoff," he says. Two of his investors said that among his clients, Mr. Madoff was considered a money-management legend; they would joke that if Mr. Madoff was a fraud, he'd take down half the world with him."

Bramdean Alternatives in the U.K. 9% of portfolio.

Banque Benedict Hentsch, Geneva-based private bank, $47.5 million.

Nomura and Neue Privat Bank. "Marketed access to Fairfield Sentry Ltd., a fund overseen by Mr. Madoff and sold through Fairfield Greenwich. The shares offered by Neue Privat and Nomura were leveraged three times -- meaning $3 of borrowed money was added to every $1 of capital invested in order to magnify returns, greatly increasing the potential losses for those investors." (WSJ)

Banco Santander. $3 billion EUR worth of exposure via its Optimal hedge fund unit and Banif asset management unit. (MarketWatch)

Unicredit. The Italian firm had unspecified amount with Madoff via its Dublin-based Pioneer alt-asset group. (MarketWatch)

http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2008/12/bernie-madoff-hosed-client-list

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is especially gratifying to see the Thyssen name there. Between 1923 and 1931 they financed the Hitler Party and Hitler might well not have come to power in 1933 without Thyssen.
After German re-unification less than 20 years ago, they colluded with those forces, political and in commerce, who were involved in the elf Aquitaine landgrab in the former East Germany, where allottments were seized without compensation for the original owners, who saw no difference between the times of the communists and the new era of golden freedom.
Thyssens belonged/belong to 'the colluding class'and I am happy to see them ruffled.

Anonymous said...

you and your stupid issues about Hitler are so sad.
the whole world is falling apart and all you can say is that u r happy about Thyssen. Are you retarded?
you are a LOSER.

Anonymous said...

I feel sorry for the losses but investors,especially high net worth individuals, should have known better when it comes to a basic investment principle...DIVERSIFICATION.

Your best protection against this type of scheme is to invests in regulated investment companies where assets are held by independent custodian(banks). The SEC should require all hedge funds to be regulated as a first step to minimize these schemes.

Anonymous said...

I am not retarded. I am just glad to see crooks like Thyssen falling into traps from other crooks.
It is important to point out the crook linkages between big money and politics because politics rule us and when they abuse their power with the help of big money to the detriment of individuals many people get hurt. If you don't say anything, it happens again and again. In whose interest would that be precisely?
I cannot take revenge on Thyssen (or the Kohl regime), and I cannot comment on the whole world, only on those aspects of which I have aquired some knowledge.
Yes, the Helmut Kohl regime, elf Aquitaine and Thyssen were stronger than me. Justice does not prevail in Germay, of course, but when someone gets hurt who has hurt you, there is some justified schadenfreunde in that.
The world may not have fallen apart if people like Thyssen, Madoff, Helmut Kohl had their nuts nipped a bit earlier.

Anonymous said...

I would have preferred to write the above as ValeskaG, but IT did not let me. I need to add, that your cynic words about retarded and loser are ugly American lingo, so I assume you must be one of those who live in a gated community with no grasp of the realities in the outside world. Or you could be one whose parents forgot to teach you manners.

If the world is falling apart, it is because of US financial mismanagement. The more a country had tied their fortunes to the US, the more the falling apart. My world is not falling apart, hardly scratched, but you sound like yours is. Then you would experience the same sense of loss that I experienced through German reunification criminality under the Kohl regime, with Thyssen being one of the profiteers. I wanted to share my joy about Thyssen's loss with someone.

The Hitler regime cost (from memory) 60 million lives and untold damage. Had Thyssens had not supported the Nazi Party with money and donations of real estate, they would not have had the money for that kind of propaganda which served Hitler as the messiah to the German people. Then the Thyssen name cropped up again in the chapter of German reunification criminality under the Kohl regime. Then the Thyssen name cropped up again in the Madoff context.

The world can only breed Hitlers and Madoffs when you let members of the colluding class like Thyssen meddle. This is the message for YOUR future, mine does not matter.

You will see the world falling apart again in 20/30 years if you have no grasp for where the interface of big money and politics exert their evil influences. Good luck!!!

I have an IQ of 149, but that did not magically cough up huge sums of money to fight the Kohl regime and their cronies like Thyssen in the courts.
You (or your family) sound like you have lost money in the big crumble, and you deserve it, too.