BBC – A Wall Street trader thought to have received the biggest bonus of all time has defended industry payouts. Adam Levinson runs two hedge funds at Fortress Investments. It was so keen to keep hold of him that they reportedly gave him a $300m slice of the company.

“In this business our…mission is to generate returns to investors. If we don’t succeed in that task, we don’t get paid,” he told BBC World Service.

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Tags: fortress investments, hedge funds, wall street trader

Reuters – Top former Merrill Lynch executives, including two former CEOs, invested in hedge funds that lost money with alleged fraudster Bernard Madoff, becoming the highest-level Wall Street victims of the scandal to date, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

Former chief executives Daniel Tully and David Komansky and former investment-banking chief Barry Friedberg personally invested in the funds, set up by former Merrill brokerage chief John Steffens, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC collapsed after the 70-year-old Wall Street trader was arrested and charged on December 11 last year with securities fraud.

Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market, is under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance in his luxury Manhattan penthouse apartment as criminal and civil investigators probe his global operations that purportedly lost $50 billion.

The firm comprised a brokerage and an investment division that Madoff ran separately in the same New York building.

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Reuters – A hedge fund manager overstated values by hundreds of millions of dollars, set up a phony accounting firm and showed uniformly positive returns for nine years to defraud investors, U.S. authorities said on Wednesday.

James Nicholson, 42, founder of Westgate Capital Management LLC of New York, was arrested and criminally charged with securities fraud and bank fraud in causing losses of as much as $100 million since 2004, prosecutors and the FBI said.

He appeared in U.S. Magistrate’s Court in Manhattan where a judge set bail of $10 million secured by five co-signors and three properties. The judge ordered Nicholson released when he meets those conditions, but he would be under house arrest with electronic monitoring.

Prosecutor Joshua Klein told the court the purported fraud could effect 372 investors. "There is a potential additional hundreds of millions of dollars involved and we have no idea where that money is," Klein said.

Nicholson’s attorney Ira Sorkin said in court that his client was not a risk of flight and that home detention was sufficient to ensure court appearances.

Sorkin, a veteran securities attorney, represents Bernard Madoff, the once-respected Wall Street trader and investment manager arrested and charged in December with a purported $50 billion global fraud.

Investigators say they have uncovered several frauds across the United States in recent months following the market meltdown.

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Tags: accounting-firm, bank fraud, bernard madoff, capital-management-llc, court appearances, electronic monitoring, fraud investigators, hedge-fund-manager, home detention, house arrest, investment manager, james nicholson, joshua klein, magistrate, market-meltdown, reuters, securities fraud, sorkin, wall street trader, wednesday james