04/09/09 Greenwich Time Editor Bruce Hunter Starts To Cover Walter "Feeder Fund" Noel With A Wire Report. Now Maybe He Will Finally Asign A Reporter

If You Want To Know What's Really Going On In Greenwich You Have To Read The Out Of Town Newspapers And National Wire Services......

Madoff victims seek assets of those who helped him




.....A judge in Connecticut issued a temporary restraining order late last month freezing the assets of top executives at Fairfield Greenwich Group, another "feeder fund" that reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in fees marketing investments with Madoff.

The court order covers the extensive, exotic real-estate holdings of the family behind the fund.


The holdings are believed to include the hilltop villa called "Yemanja" that Fairfield Greenwich co-founder Walter Noel built several years ago on the private Caribbean island of Mustique, where the family's neighbors include Tommy Hilfiger.

The Noels also have homes in Connecticut, Manhattan and the Hamptons. Noel's managing partner and son-in-law, Andres Piedrahita, has mansions in London and Madrid and a getaway on the island of Mallorca, off the Spanish coast......


.....Federal prosecutors also want his sons, Andrew and Mark, who own expensive Manhattan apartments and country homes in Greenwich, Conn., to return more than $31 million in loans they received from their parents in recent years.......

COMMENT:

Greenwich Residents Sure Are Gullible

The Noels Andrew Madoof and Mark Madoff Say They Were Fooled

By Bernard Madoff Like Everyone Else, And Had No Idea His

Investment Operation Were A Fraud

PLEASE ALSO SEE:

Madoff’s See-No-Evil Advice Didn’t Spook Insiders: Ann Woolner

Bloomberg

I’m no hedge fund manager, but this much I know: If someone handling my clients’ wealth coaches me on what to say to federal agents, I’m going to suspect the guy is doing something wrong.

Bernard Madoff in 2005 instructed executives at his biggest client, Fairfield Greenwich Advisors in Connecticut, on how to handle Securities and Exchange Commission questions about him.

“Obviously, this conversation never took place,” Madoff said in a recorded telephone call that was recently made public.

He told them to tell the SEC he has a “Chinese Wall” between his money management and brokerage businesses, though Fairfield had no way of knowing that.

He told them not to mention paperwork “because any time you say you have something in writing they ask for it,” according to a transcript of the phone call.

If that conversation raised the hair on the back of the necks of the two Fairfield managers listening, it didn’t stop them from sending billions of dollars to Madoff .....

Criminal Charges?

My question is: Why are these civil lawsuits instead of criminal charges? If these men indeed lied to investors in material ways to keep their business, isn’t that fraud?

You can’t get them for making false statements to authorities because hedge funds don’t have any reporting requirements to speak of

Beyond that, neither Cuomo nor Galvin accuses the fund managers of acting as accomplices to Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But can we infer they ignored that he may have been crooked and didn’t care?

To make criminal charges stick, prosecutors have to prove the accused meant to cheat people. It isn’t enough to show negligence or neglect of fiduciary duties. It isn’t enough to prove they lied, unless you can show they did it with the specific intent to steal. .....

.....OK, so what if the managers suspected wrongdoing and went out of their way to not find out? That is called “willful blindness” or “deliberate ignorance” or, in less stilted language, the “ostrich defense.”

If prosecutors can prove the defendants were willfully blind to Madoff’s crimes, it’s as good as proving they knew about them and that puts them closer to a criminal indictment......

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