NY Mets Owners Face More Than $1 Billion of Claims From Madoff Trustee Picard

[marmar]

(Bloomberg) The owners of the New York Mets should return $1 billion to victims of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme because they “chose to look the other way” and invest with the con man after repeated warnings of fraud, the trustee liquidating Madoff’s defunct firm said.

The trustee, Irving Picard, revised a lawsuit filed in December to add a claim that the baseball team’s owner, Sterling Equities Inc., and Madoff created a fraudulent letter agreement, as part of Sterling’s purchase of the Mets’ broadcast rights from Cablevision Systems Corp. (CVC) in 2004, according to a filing today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan.

“The amended complaint sheds more light on the deep dependency of the Sterling business organization on the continuation of the Madoff fraud and certain knowledge of indicia of fraud by the Sterling partners,” David Sheehan, counsel to Picard, said in a statement today.

Picard claims that after Madoff’s fraud was disclosed publicly in December 2008, Sterling Equities restructured its debt in a manner that attempted to block the trustee from recovering assets on behalf of Madoff victims, according to the statement. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-18/mets-owners-face-more-than-1-billion-of-claims-from-madoff-trustee-picard.html

[MrModerate]

1. I don 't entirely get it. Is the trustee saying that Sterling Equities . . .

Was at the top of Maddoff's ponzi pyramid and sucking at the same fraudulent teat? 'Cause it kind of looks like Sterling took a half-billion hit themselves when Maddoff collapsed.