The town of Fairfield, Conn., on Monday took significant legal strides toward recouping at least some of the $42 million it lost to Bernard L. Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme.
During a court hearing in Bridgeport, a judge agreed to put aside $25 million in cash escrow accounts and properties owned by Madoff relatives and business partners named in a lawsuit filed by Fairfield.
If the town wins its suit, at least that amount will be available to replenish the town’s pension fund for public employees.
Fairfield’s First Selectman Kenneth Flatto told the FOX Business Network that some 1,500 policemen, firemen and other municipal workers were affected by the Madoff scandal.
“All of these workers deserve their full pensions paid for,” he said.
Fairfield’s joint pension board had initially invested about $22 million in the Madoff fund through Maxam Capital in Darien, according to the Connecicut Post.
The last statement received on that investment in November showed the balance had swelled to $42 million just weeks before Madoff was arrested for masterminding perhaps the largest investment fraud in history.
The agreements to put aside some assets were reached with several defendants in the Fairfield suit, including, Madoff’s sons, Andrew and Mark, who own homes in Greenwich, Conn.
At the same hearing, Judge Arthur Hiller lifted a temporary restraining order issued last month that froze the assets of those defendants. Bernard Madoff and his wife Ruth’s assets are frozen through action against them by the federal government.
The restraining order named many of the most prominent players in the Madoff scandal: Madoff, his wife, his brother Peter, and son-in-law Andres Piedrahita; sons Andrew and Mark Madoff and Walter M. Noel Jr., a partner in the Fairfield Greenwich Group, a feeder fund; Sandra L. Manzke, the founder of Maxam Capital; Robert I. Schulman, the former chairman of Tremont Group Holdings; and Jeffrey H. Tucker, the co-founder of the Fairfield Greenwich Group.
Meanwhile, two tickets to the New York Mets’ opening home game of the Major League Baseball season owned by Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC were sold for $7,500 on EBay Inc.’s auction site.
The tickets for tonight’s game against the San Diego Padres at the new $800 million Citi Field, each with a face value of $525, solicited 68 bids before the auction ended Sunday. A bidding war between two people drove the price from $4,000 in the last half hour.
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Madoff’s Mets Tickets Up for Grabs
