The U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office, which is investigating the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, reportedly believes that Madoff’s U.K. operations “played a significant role in the operation” of Madoff’s scheme. The WSJ reports that the SFO expects to start filing charges within months.
The SFO also indicated that Madoff’s wife, Ruth Madoff, received two million dollars from Mr. Madoff’s U.K. business in late November 2008, just a few weeks before Madoff was arrested on December 11. According to the WSJ, the SFO is examining “significant amounts of money that went back and forth between Mr. Madoff’s trading operations in the U.S. and the U.K. outfit, called Madoff Securities International Ltd.”
During 2008, for instance, £698 million, or about $1 billion, was transferred to the U.K. outfit’s principal bank account from Mr. Madoff’s U.S. trading operations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, and £1.1 billion was transferred back across the Atlantic that year. An SFO case controller stated that the U.K. business was “a cog in the giant washing machine” of the scheme.
