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Investor's death probed in widening Madoff scandal
2008-12-24
NEW YORK (AFP) - US authorities have been investigating the apparent suicide of a French investment manager who lost more than a billion dollars in Wall Street titan Bernard Madoff's alleged pyramid scheme, amid more fallout from the widening scandal. Thierry de la Villehuchet, 65, was found dead in his Manhattan office early Tuesday with pills around him and his arm slit with a box cutter, the New York City Police Commissioner said. City authorities carried out an autopsy Wednesday, though results would not be ready until next week pending the outcome of laboratory tests, New York medical examiner's office spokeswoman Ellen Borakove told AFP. The death of the French investor came amid more revelations exposing the scale of the scandal, which has seen at least 50 billion dollars in investments evaporate after its manager admitted earlier this month to running a fraudulent investment scheme. "Now blood's on Bernie's hands," read the headline of the New York Post. Another major investor, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, acknowledged on Wednesday losing 15 million dollars to Madoff -- nearly all its assets. A court reportedly ordered a fund manager, J. Ezra Merkin, not to destroy any documents related to Madoff as part of a lawsuit by New York University, which says it lost 24 million in investments. Villehuchet left no suicide note but friends suggested the aristocrat may have been wracked with guilt over encouraging colleagues and acquaintances to invest with Madoff, and losing some 1.4 billion dollars in client investments. "Thierry got all his friends involved in this, the people who were closest to him, and he couldn't stand it," said his friend and fellow businessman Jean Karoubi. He was "undoubtedly naive but a man of honor," Karoubi added. As chief executive of Access International, Villehuchet was managing some two billion euros (2.79 billion dollars) for European clients, of which three quarters had been invested with Madoff when the scandal broke earlier this month, a source close to the fund manager said. Villehuchet was "devastated" and feared his clients would turn against him in the courts, the source said. New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters late Tuesday that Villehuchet had cuts on his arm when he was found. "It appears that there were cuts made to his arm, to his wrist, and also to his bicep area with a box cutter. There were pills present; unknown if those pills were ingested," said Kelly. Prosecutors say that Madoff , 70, has confessed to losing upwards of 50 billion dollars over years of running a pyramid scheme, where new investors were secretly fleeced to pay returns to earlier investors -- in what may be the biggest scam in the history of Wall Street. The former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market and a mainstay of the American Jewish community is currently free on bail of 10 million dollars as police continue their probe. Villehuchet's Access International Advisors was reportedly the sixth biggest loser of cash in the Madoff scheme, according to published reports. Fairfield Greenwich Group advisors suffered the largest loss, 7.5 billion dollars, followed by the hedge fun Tremont Group which lost 3.3 billion dollars. Spanish bank Banco Santander lost 2.87 billion dollars and the British bank HSBC lost one billion dollars. The philanthropic foundation run by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was among the myriad of Jewish charities hit by the Madoff funds' collapse. "We are deeply saddened and distressed that we, along with many others, have been the victims of what may be one of the largest investment frauds in history," the foundation, which seeks to fight anti-semitism, said on its website. On Tuesday, representatives of around 30 Jewish foundations met in New York to discuss potential actions in the wake of the alleged fraud. A New York state court meanwhile told the fund manager who handled investments for New York University (NYU) to refrain from concealing or destroying any papers related to Madoff, the Wall Street Journal reported. NYU has accused Merkin, chairman of GMAC -- the financing arm of General Motors that handles a range of lending services -- of failing to inform investors or carry out his responsibilities when he turned over the university's funds to Madoff. The suit filed this week also names Merkin's Ariel Fund Ltd. and Gabriel Capital Corporation, as defendants among others.
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