JPM knew all about my Ponzi.
Madoff sends info on Ponzi-complicit banks to Congress.
Start watching at 55 seconds. Bernie keeps banging the drum, this time with a letter from prison sent to Marketwatch editors, after already reaching out to CNBC and Fox Biz in the past 60 days.
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Bernard Madoff, speaking out from prison, says the banks knew of his Ponzi scheme all along. The perpetrator of a history-making $50 billion Ponzi scheme wrote in a letter to MarketWatch from jail that he is now telling government committees the story.
Madoff: “From my first interview to the media I have said that ‘the banks must have known,’ and were complicit and contributing to my crime.”
In the emailed letter, he pointed to J.P. Morgan, Bank of New York, HSBC and Citigroup as having access to information about his scam. He added that other banks also knew.
Madoff wrote that “the trustee seems unwilling to act on my offer” to help and is therefore “offering this information to the appropriate governmental committees in the hope that this information will prove helpful in future regulation of the appropriate institutions.”
The House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee had no immediate comment on whether they had received information from Madoff. A spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency declined to comment.
Madoff’s comments come as prosecutors are looking at whether J.P. Morgan failed to fully alert authorities to suspicions about Madoff’s finances, according to a report in the New York Times on Wednesday.
J.P. Morgan is reportedly also embroiled in a squabble with regulators over a government probe into the institution’s relationship with Madoff. According to a January report by Reuters, the OCC, J.P. Morgan’s chief regulator, has been unable to obtain documents it requested from the bank in connection with an investigation into its relationship with Madoff.
The report cites a letter from Treasury Department Inspector General Eric Thorson to J.P. Morgan’s general counsel, Stephen Cutler, saying the OCC has been unable to obtain what it is seeking. Madoff had an account at J.P. Morgan Chase that he used to transfer funds between offices.
Earlier tonight:
More detail is here: