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A former trader at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities is expected to plead guilty on Monday to conspiring to defraud firm customers beginning in the early 1970s, two decades earlier than Mr. Madoff claims to have started his Ponzi scheme. David L. Kugel, who joined the Madoff firm as a trader in 1970, is scheduled to enter his guilty plea in Federal District Court in Manhattan, according to a letter sent to Judge Laura Taylor Swain by federal prosecutors on Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The trustee for Bernard L. Madoff's fraud victims said on Thursday that he had overestimated how much his recovery efforts would be affected by a court ruling this week in his case against the owners of the New York Mets. The practical effect of the ruling, released on Tuesday by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of United States District Court in Manhattan, will be to reduce the amount of money the trustee, Irving H. Picard, can seek in court by $6.2 billion -- not by $11 billion, as the trustee's lawyers reported on Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A ruling this week in a case the trustee for victims of Bernard L. Madoff's Ponzi scheme had filed against the owners of the New York Mets could wind up cutting the amount available to pay all victim claims by up to $11 billion, a lawyer for the trustee said on Wednesday. The lawyer, David J. Sheehan, said the ruling in the Mets case also would require the trustee, Irving H. Picard, to delay an initial cash payment to eligible victims, scheduled for later this week, until he can determine the ruling's impact on the amounts owed to other victims of the epic fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HOSTILE TAKEOVER The reinsurer Validus Holdings said on Wednesday that it would seek to replace the board of Transatlantic Holdings. Transatlantic's shareholders are scheduled to vote next week on a proposed all-stock merger with Allied World Assurance. ''Validus believes the Transatlantic board has repeatedly failed to take the necessary steps to secure greater value for Transatlantic stockholders,'' Edward J. Noonan, above, chief executive of Validus, said in a statement. MICHAEL J. de la MERCED [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As Bernard L. Madoff waits in jail to be sentenced, legal problems are accumulating for some of the hedge fund managers who helped him raise billions of dollars from around the world for what he now admits was a vast Ponzi scheme. Massachusetts regulators have sued the Fairfield Greenwich Group, one of the earliest of these so-called feeder fund managers, for fraud, saying it had repeatedly misled investors about how diligently it checked out Mr. Madoff's operations over the years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Unless a better bid emerges, the stock trading business that was the pride of Bernard L. Madoff's business for decades -- a business he valued at $700 million just a few months ago -- will be sold for just $15 million. Mr. Madoff is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to operating a vast, long-running Ponzi scheme. Since his arrest in December, a court-appointed trustee has been liquidating his assets for the benefit of his defrauded customers, whose reported losses totaled $65 billion. So far he has raised about $1 billion to return to customers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After months in the background, Peter B. Madoff is suddenly being pulled into the spotlight focused on his older brother, Bernard L. Madoff, who has confessed to running a global Ponzi scheme. One problem became public on Wednesday, when a Nassau County judge imposed a temporary freeze on Peter Madoff's assets in response to a lawsuit by the beneficiary of a trust fund that was lost in the scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The trustee handling the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff's brokerage business told a federal judge on Monday that he had found $75 million in new assets in Gibraltar. He also said he was monitoring claims against the Madoffs' chateau in France, and had received clearance from a British court to work with counterparts in London on liquidating the Madoff business there. But at the same time, the court-appointed trustee, Irving H. Picard of the law firm Baker Hostetler, was meeting stiff opposition from prosecutors in New York. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The federal investigation into Bernard L. Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme widened Wednesday with the arrest of an accountant who had audited Mr. Madoff's investment advisory business for more than a decade. David G. Friehling, who operated from a tiny storefront office in the New York City suburb of New City in Rockland County, was charged with securities fraud and with aiding the investment adviser fraud committed by Mr. Madoff. A related civil case was filed against him and his firm, Friehling & Horowitz, by the Securities and Exchange Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Money market funds would promise investors greater safety, but at the price of lower yields, if regulators agreed to a set of changes that the mutual fund industry's leaders will release on Wednesday. The proposals were drafted by an industry study group whose work began in late 2007 but became far more urgent in September, when a run on a giant money fund forced the Treasury Department to set up an ad hoc insurance program to stem a panic in the nearly $4 trillion money fund market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Bernard L. Madoff entered a federal courtroom in Manhattan on Thursday to admit that he had run a vast Ponzi scheme that robbed thousands of investors of their life savings, he was as elegantly dressed as ever. But, preparing for jail, he wore no wedding ring -- only the shadowy imprint remained of one he has worn for nearly 50 years. He admitted his guilt for the first time in public, and apologized to his victims, dozens of whom were squeezed into the courtroom benches behind him, before being handcuffed and led away to jail to await sentencing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Bernard L. Madoff arrives in federal court on Thursday to plead guilty to operating a vast 20-year Ponzi scheme, there is a strong chance that he will not return home. Under a $10 million bail agreement, Mr. Madoff has been confined to his penthouse apartment since his arrest on Dec. 11. As he was presumed innocent, the government had to persuade the court that he should not be allowed bail -- something prosecutors failed to do at a bail revocation hearing in January. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For those who lost everything to Bernard L. Madoff, news that he plans to plead guilty and face life in prison brings little comfort. ''While I am glad that Madoff is pleading guilty and will serve a life sentence, I hope he is incarcerated with other rapists, not fellow scam artists that can laugh about the frauds they perpetrated,'' said Richard B. Shapiro, 55, a former real estate developer from Los Angeles who invested nearly his entire life savings with Mr. Madoff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''As one Jew to another, I deeply regret that the Sorkin family did not perish in the Nazi death camps.'' That is just one of the angry messages that have poured in to Ira Lee Sorkin since he became lawyer for Bernard L. Madoff, expected to plead guilty this week to a fraud that prosecutors call a giant Ponzi scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bernard L. Madoff is facing life in prison for operating a vast Ponzi scheme that began at least 20 years ago and consumed billions of dollars of other people's money. While his fate will not be certain until he is sentenced, his lawyer told a federal judge on Tuesday that he intended to plead guilty on Thursday to all the criminal charges that federal prosecutors had filed against him -- a list that could yield a prison sentence of 150 years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lawyers for the disgraced financier Bernard L. Madoff told a federal judge on Tuesday that Mr. Madoff was expected to plead guilty later this week to charges that would result in a life sentence. ''I gather it is the expectation that he will plead guilty'' on Thursday, Judge Chin said, referring to Mr. Madoff, who is accused of being the mastermind of a huge Ponzi scheme that cheated thousands of investors out of billions of dollars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bernard L. Madoff is expected to plead guilty on Thursday to charges that he operated a worldwide $50 billion Ponzi scheme, according to court documents filed late Friday. A ''plea proceeding'' on that date was cited in the filings as part of a proposal by federal prosecutors for allowing Mr. Madoff's victims to be heard in court. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than a dozen Wall Street trading firms systematically cheated their customers of millions of dollars by improperly slicing bits of profit from countless trades, federal regulators said on Wednesday. The Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed the allegations after negotiating settlements. The firms did not admit or deny the charges but agreed to pay a total of more than $69 million in forfeited profits and penalties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lawyers for Bernard L. Madoff have asked that prosecutors be barred from seizing the New York City apartment of the Madoffs and $62 million in bonds and cash that they say belong to Mr. Madoff's wife, Ruth, and ''are unrelated to the alleged Madoff fraud.'' The request was acknowledged, but not granted, in court documents filed on Monday both by federal prosecutors and the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Mr. Madoff's estate for the benefit of his former customers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Reserve Primary Fund, the giant money market fund that was pushed into a tailspin by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September, estimated on Thursday that legal fees and damage claims stemming from that crisis would ultimately cost its investors more than Lehman did. The fund's $64 billion portfolio held about $785 million in Lehman notes when the investment bank filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15. Hit by a wave of redemptions, the fund jolted a nervous market on Sept. 16 by ''breaking the buck,'' reporting a share price of 97 cents to investors who had long expected an unwavering share price of a dollar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The clients who trusted Bernard L. Madoff still do not know exactly what he did with their money. But they know what he did not do with it: He did not buy any of those blue-chip stocks and Treasury bills listed on their account statements over the last 13 years. The court-appointed trustee who is winding down Mr. Madoff's business said on Friday that his team had searched records going back almost to 1993 and found no evidence that any securities were bought for investors during that time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On Dec. 10, the day before Bernard L. Madoff was arrested, his wife, Ruth, withdrew $10 million from a brokerage firm partly owned by her husband, according a state regulatory complaint filed in Boston. It was her second withdrawal in less than three weeks -- the first one, on Nov. 25, had been for $5.5 million, the complaint said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Days before a deadline in his criminal case, Bernard L. Madoff has agreed to a partial settlement of civil accusations that he ran a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. The settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, disclosed at midday Monday, does not affect the criminal securities fraud charges that were also filed against Mr. Madoff on Dec. 11. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

was it only two months ago? -- when people would have been proud to be on a list of Bernard L. Madoff's customers. They had made the cut, and their money was getting the Madoff touch, growing steadily and solidly in good times and bad. There they would be, among boldfaced names from the real estate world, the sports community, the arts and the corner offices of American business. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than $60 million of Westport National Bank customers' money was in an account that the bank had with Bernard L. Madoff shortly before he was arrested in December and charged with operating a global Ponzi scheme. None of the money belonged to the bank, a division of Connecticut Community Bank in Westport, but the account was in its name. For that reason, the true customers may not qualify for the federal securities insurance program that is expected to cushion investors' losses, lawyers said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In addition to the gossip fodder, serious pension problems and significant accounting issues are embedded in the list of customers assembled by the trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Bernard L. Madoff's brokerage firm. At least a half-dozen construction unions, including locals of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Plumbers & Steamfitters union, had entrusted pension funds and health care money to Mr. Madoff, according to the list. The roster also includes locals representing roofers, carpenters and laborers, mostly in upstate New York. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Securities regulators could not cool the white-hot Congressional fury on Wednesday over their failure to act on tips that might have exposed the Madoff scandal almost a decade ago. At a contentious hearing by a House Financial Services subcommittee, Harry Markopolos, a private fraud investigator from Boston, detailed his persistent but futile efforts to spur the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Bernard L. Madoff, going back to 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The man who tried unsuccessfully for almost a decade to spur federal securities regulators to investigate Bernard L. Madoff did not initially disclose his own identity to regulators because he feared for his life, according to testimony he has apparently prepared for a Congressional hearing Wednesday morning. The witness, Harry Markopolos, will testify that Mr. Madoff ''was one of the most powerful men on Wall Street and in a position to easily end our careers or worse,'' and that his fund ''posed great danger'' to those who investigated it, based on a version of his remarks that emerged Tuesday evening. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JPMorgan Chase says that its potential losses related to Bernard L. Madoff, the man accused of engineering an immense global Ponzi scheme, are ''pretty close to zero.'' But what some angry European investors want to know is when the bank cut its exposure to Mr. Madoff -- and why. As early as 2006, the bank had started offering investors a way to leverage their bets on the future performance of two hedge funds that invested with Mr. Madoff. To protect itself from the resulting risk, the bank put $250 million of its own money into those funds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State regulators in Massachusetts have accused top executives of the Reserve Fund of lying to shareholders about the safety of their investments hours before the firm's largest money fund disclosed that its share price had fallen below a dollar -- and then giving big shareholders first crack at avoiding losses. The blunt accusations were made in an administrative complaint filed this week by William F. Galvin, the secretary of the commonwealth and the senior securities regulator in Massachusetts. They expand on claims already made in a shareholder lawsuit in federal court in Minneapolis, and may explain why the enforcement staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission has recommended a full-scale investigation of the Reserve's complex management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To friends, they were ''Bernie-and-Ruth'' or ''Ruth-and-Bernie,'' a pair so inseparable that you wouldn't mention one without the other. After nearly 50 years of marriage, they worked in the same Midtown Manhattan office, they traveled together, and they dined together night after night, just the two of them. ''They came once or twice a week, for about 22 years, and for the last five I could count on one hand the number of times they came with another couple,'' says Giuliano Zuliani, owner of Primola, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. ''They always wanted a quiet table in the back, just the two of them.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The disgraced financier Bernard L. Madoff, confined for weeks to his Manhattan apartment under 24-hour guard, got a chilly outing to the courthouse on Wednesday -- and, after a federal judge refused to revoke his bail, it was a round trip. Tracked to the courthouse doors by helicopters and video cameras, Mr. Madoff sat in silence during the hourlong hearing as his lawyers did battle with federal prosecutors who want him sent to jail pending resolution of the criminal case that accuses him of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A federal magistrate refused on Monday a government request that Bernard L. Madoff be jailed until he can be tried on charges of operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, saying that the government had not proved that he was a flight risk or a security risk. The ruling, by Magistrate Judge Ronald L. Ellis, allows Mr. Madoff to remain in his Manhattan apartment, wearing an electronic monitor device and being watched around the clock by a security team paid for by his wife. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE amount of cash held in money market funds at the start of 2009 exceeded the money in stock mutual funds for the first time in more than a decade, as shaken investors sought a familiar safe haven. Yet 2008 may go down in history as the year that cast doubt on everything American investors thought they knew about money market funds. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Peter B. Madoff, the younger brother and longtime business partner of Bernard L. Madoff, has said that his brother disclosed his huge fraud scheme to him the evening before confessing to his sons, according to people briefed on the chronology of the scandal. The timing of the confessions raises questions about whether Peter Madoff had an obligation to report his brother's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme to federal authorities immediately, as the Madoff sons did when their father informed them the next day, Dec. 10. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The trustee overseeing the bankruptcy of Bernard L. Madoff's trading firm has made an urgent request to the court for unusually broad authority to subpoena witnesses and documents, citing the vast scale of what is alleged to be a $50-billion Ponzi scheme. While not unprecedented, the request from the trustee, Irving H. Picard, is far from routine, and it illustrates how much Mr. Picard's burdens have expanded beyond a trustee's traditional tasks of identifying assets and selling them to satisfy claims. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The federal court in Manhattan will be the forum in the coming weeks for three important issues affecting investors caught in the widening scandal surrounding Bernard L. Madoff, who is accused of operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Most important, Judge Louis L. Stanton of United States District Court, who is handling the civil case against Mr. Madoff, is being urged to consider broadening the protections normally available to investors in failed Wall Street firms to allow for the ''devastating'' circumstances of the Madoff scandal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beginning on Wednesday, the federal court in Manhattan will be the forum for three important issues affecting investors caught in the widening scandal surrounding Bernard L. Madoff, accused of operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Most important, Judge Louis L. Stanton of United States District Court, who is handling the civil case against Mr. Madoff, is being urged to consider broadening the protections normally available to investors in failed Wall Street firms to allow for the ''devastating'' circumstances of the Madoff scandal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Federal investigators have found no evidence so far that members of Bernard L. Madoff's family helped him carry out what may be the largest financial fraud in history, according to a person briefed on the case. Mr. Madoff's sons, Andrew and Mark, and his brother, Peter, all occupied senior positions at his firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, whose assets were frozen after Mr. Madoff told law enforcement agents on Thursday that he had defrauded investors of up to $50 billion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]