I very much doubt it.
True, Madoff has allegedly confessed that he perpetrated a massive fraud that left behind $50 billion in losses; and he claimed to have done this all alone.
But this is a man who kept false records, sent bogus documentation, bilked investors for billions, lied for years to friends and knowingly harmed charities. It's within the realm of acceptable behavior to cast a jaundiced eye upon his confession.
"Speaking as a Jew on Christmas, I would be less shocked if Santa Claus showed up to my house than if Bernie Madoff pulled off this fraud alone," says Ron Geffner, a partner at law firm Sadis & Goldberg who specializes in structuring, organizing and counseling hedge funds and other investment advisors.
"It's hard to imagine that given the amount of assets that he managed that people would not have been aware. If nothing else, employees, no matter what floor they were on, would have known that somewhere within the firm money was being lost," Geffner adds.
To put it into perspective, if a company generated $50 billion in revenue, it would be in the Fortune 50. That's a huge sum to hide, even over a period of years. To date, the largest similar fraud has been Sam Israel's Bayou Group, which turned out to be a $400 million ponzi scheme. Even Tom Petters, who managed to keep a huge investment scheme going for 13 years, only lost $3 billion for investors.
Not only is it difficult to hide $50 billion in losses without anyone knowing, it's hard to manage that much money. The amount of paperwork generated by a legitimate operation requires a huge backroom operation and lots of employees just to keep careful records of trades, profit and loss, and investor distributions and redemptions.
To successfully run a fraudulent operation for as long as Madoff did, he would not only need to keep records of what was actually going in and out of his operation, he would have to falsify an alternative sets of books, trading records and investor returns.
"This was a very large scheme, and he couldn't have done it without the cooperation and assistance of someone well informed who could process trades, report them and create monthly statements," says Doug Kass, founder of the dedicated short fund Seabreeze Partners. "Someone had to help him falsify all those reports, conduct mail fraud and create multiple sets of books."
No comments:
Post a Comment