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The agency is scrutinising bank withdrawals made by former employees of Mr Madoff and their personal activities, including where they travel and with whom they mix.
The 1992 investigation centered on Avellino & Bienes, a tiny New York accounting firm run by Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes. According to court filings, the duo started raising money from clients, friends, and relatives 30 years earlier, handing the cash over to Madoff to invest. By 1984, Avellino and Bienes had ditched their accounting practice altogether to focus exclusively on finding investors for Madoff. Avellino and Bienes didn't return calls.
The firm had its own "feeders," associates who rounded up cash that eventually made its way to Madoff. In 1989 accountants Steven Mendelow and Edward Glantz, whose office was on the same floor as Avellino & Bienes in a Manhattan office building, joined the game. According to the SEC's complaint, Mendelow and Glantz collected $89 million for Avellino & Bienes. Glantz's son Richard later started raising money as well. The party ended in 1992 when the SEC demanded in a settlement that the firms close up shop, reimburse $454 million to 3,200 investors, and pay a collective $875,000 fine. Edward Glantz has since passed away. Mendelow couldn't be reached.
Lawyers representing the victims of Bernard Madoff's alleged $50bn (€36bn) fraud are urging the US government to rescue them with taxpayer’s money by bolstering the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, according to a report in The Observer, London.
With an aggressive style that stood out in the staid world of Austrian banking even more than her bouffant red wig, Sonja Kohn made few friends gathering billions for Bernard L. Madoff from wealthy investors in Russia and across Europe.
Now, she has even fewer. Mrs. Kohn has dropped out of sight, leaving the firm she founded, Bank Medici, in the hands of Austrian regulators, who took it over last week.
.....
But another theory widely repeated by those who know Mrs. Kohn is that she may be afraid of some particularly displeased investors: Russian oligarchs whose money made up a chunk of the $2.1 billion that Bank Medici invested with Mr. Madoff.