Picower Estate Settles For $7 billion

AP source: Madoff trustee gets $7B settlement
AP source: Madoff trustee reaches $7B settlement with estate of Fla. philanthropist


NEW YORK (AP) -- The trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff's burned investors has reached a $7.2 billion settlement with the estate of a Florida philanthropist and businessman.

The figure was provided Friday to The Associated Press by a person familiar with the civil case against the estate of Jeffry Picower. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the settlement and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Court-appointed trustee Irving Picard planned an announcement Friday in Manhattan.

Picower drowned after suffering a heart attack in the swimming pool of his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion on Oct. 25, 2009.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff's burned investors has reached a settlement with the estate of a Florida philanthropist and businessman who made billions of dollars off the fraud.

Court-appointed trustee Irving Picard planned an announcement Friday in Manhattan about the estate of Jeffry Picower, who drowned after suffering a heart attack in the swimming pool of his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion on Oct. 25, 2009.

The amount of the settlement was not immediately made public.

Picower, who was 67 when he died, invested many years ago with Madoff. Picard's investigators said that, over time, he withdrew about $7 billion in bogus profits from his accounts. That amounts to more than a third of the dollars that disappeared in the scandal.

That money was supposedly made on stock trades, but authorities said that in reality it was simply stolen from other investors.

Picower's lawyers claimed he knew nothing about the scheme, but the trustee argued in court papers that he must have known that his returns were "implausibly high" and based on fraud.

Lawyers for Picower's estate have been in negotiations with the trustee for some time.

After Picower drowned, his will revealed that he had earmarked most of his fortune for charity, but his widow said in a statement that the family wished to return some of it to Madoff's victims through "a fair and generous settlement."

A huge charitable foundation that Picower had created with part of his fortune closed in 2009 after its assets were wiped out in the Madoff fraud.

It had donated hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges, libraries and other nonprofit groups.