The victims of Bernard Madoff, author of the worst financial scam in history, will receive $ 488 million in additional reimbursements from a special compensation fund, the US Department of Justice announced on Thursday (December 10).
Payments will be made to more than 30,000 people cheated by the crooked financier's shenanigans around the world in the sixth such operation, bringing the total refunds to nearly $ 3.2 billion, the ministry added in a statement.
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The authorities had set up this fund to identify the complaints of victims and compensate them for this scam, exposed in broad daylight at the end of 2008. It must return a total of 4.05 billion dollars.
Bernard Madoff, aged 82, was sentenced in 2009 to 150 years in prison for this pyramid-type fraud estimated between 25 and 63 billion dollars - depending on whether or not interest is counted: he had never placed a only cent of the sums entrusted by its clients, drawing from the funds of new investors to remunerate or reimburse the oldest.
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The former financier is currently serving his sentence in a North Carolina federal medical prison.
He had requested earlier this year to be released due to fatal kidney disease and other health problems, but his request was rejected in June by the judge who sentenced him in 2009.
The restitution fund is separate from the activities of Irving Picard, the judicial liquidator of the company Bernard Madoff Investments Securities, who for his part recovered billions of dollars invested by victims of the scammer and returned a large part of them.
