Hans Rustad Hvem hjalp Bernard Madoff gjennomføre tidenes pyramidesvindel? Etterforskerne tror ikke han kan ha greid det på egen hånd. Til det var operasjonen for komplisert. Hver måned ble det produsert globale markedsanalyser som i seg selv er krevende. En 70-åring kan ikke ha klart det på egen hånd.
The firm had clients around the globe. Simply generating the detailed financial statements investors got in the mail every month would have been a monumental effort for just one person, observers said, even if those reports were pure fantasy.
«Someone had to create them. Someone had to create the appearance that there were returns,» said attorney Harry Susman, who represents several Madoff investors.
«The guy was 70 years old. Could he have done it himself? The computer systems would have needed to be extensive. Supposedly, he’s selling puts, buying puts, selling calls, buying stocks. Somebody had to sit there and buy stocks. Where are these people?»
Noe annet gjør det enda mindre sannsynlig at Madoff kunne gjort arbeidet selv: han arbeidet med 60-tallsmetoder, og kjøpte og solgte aksjer selv. Det var en av grunnene til at flere som kikket på firmaet hans, bestemte seg for ikke å samarbeide med ham.
Usually, a fund like Madoff’s would use an outside brokerage firm to complete its stock trades. In his case, those duties — if they actually occurred — were apparently handled in-house.
He appeared not to have hired outside professional services firms to help calculate his performance or to produce electronic data for investors.
«He was still doing it the way you did it in the 1960s, with a paper ticket,» said Suzanne Murphy, a hedge fund consultant who had examined Madoff’s business two years ago before deciding not to invest in it.
«In most hedge funds, you have many partners in deals, but he was doing everything in a self-contained way,» said Jake Walthour, head of advisory services for the due diligence firm Aksia LLC, which also examined Madoff’s operation and decided something was wrong.
Denne mangel på partnere gjorde sannsynligheten for å bli oppdaget mindre.
Madoffs regnskapsfirma var et lite firma som holder til på ett kontor, og med varierende kontortider.
Questions also loom about Madoff’s auditor, Friehling & Horowitz, a relatively unknown accountant in the city’s northern suburbs who appeared to operate from a one-room office with irregular business hours and a bare-bones staff.
Those audits apparently failed to detect the fraud, which Madoff told investigators was a Ponzi scheme that lost an estimated $50 billion.
Hvordan er det mulig at Madoff har kunnet svindle og sløse bort 50 milliarder dollar uten at spillet ble avslørt?
Det er grunn til å tro at Barack Obamas administrasjon vil sette mye inn på å oppklare økonomiske forbrytelser. Det handler om å gjenopprette tillit, og Obama har gjentatte ganger sagt at visse regler må følges.
