Lawsuit claims Picower profits from Madoff $5 billion

According to the statement of a lawsuit by the trustee liquidating the Madoff firm, investor Jeffry Picower, whose charitable foundation closed after the Madoff scandal erupted, profited to the minimum of $5 billion from the scheme. The lawsuit on Tuesday by Irving Picard, who is spearheading a global search to return money to thousands of defrauded customers, is similar to others in claiming Picower and his wife Barbara "knew or should have known" they were profiting from fraud. The rates of return they received from investments with New York financier Bernard Madoff were implausibly high. Picard claimed that in several cases Picower's purported annual rates of return were more than 100 %, with some annual returns as high as 500 % or even 950 %. So far the trustee has recovered about $1 billion to pay back customers but he has swore to do his best to recover as much as possible from the worldwide $65 billion fraud. In December, the Picower Foundation, a philanthropic fund that supported programs ranging from medical research to education, said it was shutting down because of losses from investments with Madoff. Madoff, 71, a former nonexecutive chairman of Nasdaq, is jailed for heading Wall Street's biggest investment fraud and is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.