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Peter Madoff pleads guilty over links to Ponzi fraud | |
(about 4 hours later) | |
The brother of convicted Ponzi scheme swindler Bernard Madoff has pleaded guilty at a court in Manhattan, New York, to charges relating to the $65bn (£41bn) dollar fraud. | |
Peter Madoff, 66, href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/29_06_12_madoff.pdf" >admitted conspiracy and falsifying financial records and has accepted a 10-year jail term. | |
Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, which operated from the early 1990s, stole savings from thousands of investors. | |
He is serving a 150-year jail sentence after being convicted in 2009. | He is serving a 150-year jail sentence after being convicted in 2009. |
The FBI took Peter Madoff into custody at his lawyer's office in New York earlier on Friday. | |
'Epic pain' | |
Madoff told the judge he was "deeply ashamed and terribly sorry", but also said he had not known about the scandal until December 2008, when his brother admitted to it. | |
When he discovered the scam "I was in shock and my world was destroyed. I lost everything I worked for," Madoff said. | |
The elder Madoff, now 79, has repeatedly denied that his brother had any involvement in the scheme, which saw some $20bn of investments disappear and a balance sheet of $65bn revealed to be a sham. | |
His "investment fund" was once thought to be the biggest hedge fund in the world. | |
But Peter Madoff told the court on Friday that he had helped his brother send what remained of the money to a selected group of people that included some friends and relatives. | |
"I was shocked and devastated but nevertheless I did as my brother had said, as I had consistently done for decades," Madoff said. "I knew that the conduct was wrong and I am deeply ashamed." | |
The money was never sent out. | |
Prosecutors also told the court that sometimes Madoff would sign weeks of compliance reports in a single sitting, changing pens and ink colours to give the impression they had been signed at different times. | |
"Peter Madoff played an essential enabling role in the largest investment fraud in US history. He made a pretence of compliance; he was really about complicity," FBI Assistant Director Janice Fedarcyk said in a statement. | |
"The Madoff investment empire, built on a foundation of deceit, was a house of cards that grew to skyscraper proportions. | |
"As Peter Madoff has admitted today, he was one of the chief architects," she added. | |
Meanwhile, US Attorney Preet Bharara said: "Peter Madoff enabled the largest fraud in human history. He will now be jailed well into old age, and he will forfeit virtually every penny he has. | |
"We are not yet finished calling to account everyone responsible for the epic fraud of Bernard Madoff and the epic pain of his many victims." | |
Madoff has been released on $5m bail, secured by $1m in cash or property. He is scheduled to be sentenced on 4 October. | |
Prosecutors have also said Madoff has agreed to surrender all his assets. |