Trustee sues Madoff banker for nearly 20 billion dollars

AFP - A trustee charged with recovering assets from the massive Bernard Madoff fraud case on Friday sued an Austrian banker and her alleged conspirators for 19.6 billion dollars.

In a lawsuit filed in a New York court -- the largest civil lawsuit filed in the case to date -- Irving Picard claims Sonja Kohn collaborated for more than 20 years with Madoff in his massive Ponzi scheme.

"In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own," Picard said in a statement.

According to the lawsuit, Kohn, 62, who lives in Europe, built in 1985 the Medici Enterprise, which still operates, to feed Madoff's scheme with money from new investors.

"For more than twenty years, Kohn masterminded a vast illegal scheme... to exploit her privileged relationship with Madoff to feed over 9.1 billion dollars of other people's money into his Ponzi scheme."

"No Ponzi scheme can survive without a constant influx of fresh capital, and the illegal scheme provided a flood of cash for Madoff," Irving said in the lawsuit.

According to Picard, Kohn founded the Medici Enterprise in Austria together with more than 50 individuals and firms, including Bank Austria, Italy's biggest bank UniCredit and "dozens of trusts and nominee companies established under the laws of many different countries to further and conceal the illegal scheme."

The lawsuit came just hours before Picard's deadline to file lawsuits against Madoff's alleged enablers expires when the statue of limitations kicks in at midnight.

Picard estimated the total money lost in the Madoff-Kohn Ponzi scheme at approximately 19.6 billion dollars in net investor deposits, saying that Madoff had secretly paid Kohn at least 62 million dollars in kickbacks.

"Without Kohn's illegal scheme, the Ponzi scheme could not have continued for as long as it did," he said.

But while Kohn "held herself as extremely close to Madoff," she and her co-conspirators were cautious not to ever establish direct accounts in Madoff's scheme, he said.

Madoff, who touted himself as one of New York's most successful money managers, was arrested in early December 2008 for running a pyramid scheme. He was sentenced in June 2009 to 150 years in prison.

Madoff's victims, including charities, major banks, Hollywood moguls and savvy financial players, handed him tens of billions of dollars over more than two decades.

The amount of money stolen remains elusive: Madoff originally claimed to have been managing 65 billion dollars, but in October the court-appointed liquidator said the real bottom line was 21.2 billion dollars.

Picard has filed in recent days a raft of lawsuits against individuals and banks from the United States, Europe and Japan seeking to recover some of the lost assets.