Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
Denver Post – Bernard Madoff asked a federal judge this week to sentence him to as little as 12 years in prison after he pleaded guilty earlier this year to operating a massive, decades- long Ponzi scheme.
In a letter filed late Monday and made public Tuesday, Ira Sorkin, a lawyer for Madoff, asked U.S. District Judge Denny Chin to sentence his client to less than a life sentence.
"Mr. Madoff is currently 71 years old and has an approximate life expectancy of 13 years," Sorkin said. "A prison term of 12 years — just short of an effective life sentence — will sufficiently address the goals of deterrence, protecting the public and promoting respect for the law without being greater than necessary to achieve them."
istockAnalyst.com – I’ve always been a fan of what are now called "alternative investments" and never really cared as much for "generic index style equities", although I have owned them of course. Property, commodities, gold and higher yield instruments were always more interesting to me once I began to understand how imbedded inflation really was in the modern world.
Now that I am retired and living on my money, my "business" is to generate income as a goal more important than capital gains. Increasingly I am working on the great divide between tax-deferred and taxable accounts in the US, now and for the future. Perhaps we should call them "totally taxable" and "partly taxable" accounts since every penny one takes out of the IRA or 401K is taxable while only gains and dividends and interest are taxable from the taxable accounts.
FierceFinance – David Einhorn, the head of Greenlight Capital, caused quite a stir at the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference last year. He made it known that he was shorting Lehman Brothers, which was trading at $60 at the time. You know the rest of the story.
It’s no surprise that people, including a columnist for the New York Post, were interested in what he had to say at the conference this year. He didn’t deliver the same sort of shocker. Rather, he offered a sober analysis of the Obama Administration’s performance. He basically thinks that the focus on propping up banks hasn’t really done much to the economy as a whole.
Bloomberg – At last year’s Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference, Greenlight Capital Inc.’s David Einhorn told an audience of hedge-fund managers that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. wasn’t disclosing the whole truth about its finances.
Four months later, Lehman filed the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. The conference attendees who followed his advice got a jump on the rest of the industry. They also got a tax write-off since all the registration fees go to cancer research and an art-therapy program for seriously ill children.
Hindustan Times - Bernard Madoff, whose $50-billion fraud devastated individual and institutional investors worldwide, could spend the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty later this week.
In a court hearing Tuesday, defence lawyer Ira Sorkin said that Madoff would plead guilty Thursday in federal court in New York. The news confirmed recent reports that Madoff was expected to enter a guilty plea.
At the hearing, Assistant US Attorney Marc Litt said that Madoff faces 11 criminal counts including securities fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering and filing false statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Litt said that Madoff faces up to 150 years in prison on the charges under federal sentencing guidelines, The Wall Street Journal reported online.
Herald Tribune – Partners of failed hedge fund trader Arthur Nadel said they were shocked to learn after Nadel disappeared on Jan. 14 that the six hedge funds for which he did the trading had been emptied of their purported $300 million in assets.
But what seems mysterious to them raised red flags in 2005 for the founders of HedgeCo.Net, a West Palm Beach hedge fund database site. HedgeCo dropped three funds run by Nadel’s Scoop Management Inc. — Valhalla Investment Partners LP, Viking Fund LLC and Viking IRA LLC. The concerns were: reported returns that were considerably higher than normal, no outside firm to verify the numbers and no outside administrator to monitor the accounts and send out statements to investors.
Bloomberg - A hedge fund manager who used the same defense lawyer as Bernard Madoff received a sentence that was a third of the maximum possible after he was convicted of defrauding investors out of $10 million.
Vincent Montagna remains free on bail more than two years after pleading guilty. He was sentenced to 40 months in prison instead of a possible 9-year term. His lawyer, Ira Sorkin, also represents Madoff, the New York investment adviser U.S. prosecutors accused of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
Though Montagna and Madoff aren’t known to be connected beyond their choice of attorney, the case may provide a window on Madoff’s prospects in avoiding or reducing the maximum 20 years in prison he faces if convicted. Madoff, 70, is free on bail, though restricted to his Manhattan apartment.
