Corporate Governance

Madoff the Murderer?

By J. Robert Brown

We look back on the extraordinary testimony given by Harry Markopolos.  There are a number of interesting comments in his written testimony.  One of them concerns his belief that the investigation into the Madoff Ponzi scheme might result in harm to his family or his team.  As he stated:

• Because nothing was done, I became fearful for the safety of my family until the SEC finally acknowledged, after Madoff had been arrested, that it had received credible evidence of Madoff's Ponzi Scheme several years earlier.

Sometimes the concern about harm was to Markopolos and "his team."  This impacted the material submitted to the SEC.  As he states: 

• "In order to minimize the risk of discovery of our activities and the potential threat of harm to me any my team, I submitted reports to the SEC without signing them.  My team and I surmised that if Mr. Madoff gained knowledge of our activities, he may feel threatened enough to seek to stifle us.  If Mr. Madoff was already facing life in prison, there was little to no downside for him to remove any such threat.  At various points throughout these nine years each of us feared for our lives.  Or analysis lead us to conclude that Mr. Madoff's fund and the secret walls around it post great danger to those questioning and investigating them."

Markopolos goes on to acknowledged that "neither my team nor I had any personal knowledge of Mr. Madoff or his psychological make up.  As such we had only the conclusions of our investigation into his fund to surmise of what he may have been capable."  Markopolos did know, though, that in fact Madoff "was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse."

That Madoff was a crook now seems clear enough.  Was he also a potential thug, prepared to harm those investigating his scheme (or their families?).  Markopolos apparently thinks he was.

Full post as published by The Race to the Bottom on February 07, 2009 (boomark / email).