Bernie+Madoff+expert+interview

To learn more about legal and illegal investments, I interviewed Judith Halabrin who is the senior vice president of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. She explained to me exactly what aspects of the Madoff scheme were illegal and how illegal investment schemes compared to legal investments.



**Q:** What are the differences between a legal investment scheme and the Madoff scheme?

**A:** Legal investments never comingle the money of the investors.There is always a seperation of account and owner and the statistics must be filed with the SEC(Securities Exchange Comission). The Madoff scheme comingled the inestor's money, made false statements(falsifying statements to cover up crimes) and didn't report statistics to the SEC.

**Q:** How did the Madoff scheme finally collapse?


 * A: ** Harry Markopolos exposed the scheme, the SEC started to pay more attention to Madoff's firm, Madoff's staff started to figure out what was happening, and there ceased to be new investors because of the poor economic situation.


 * Q: ** How does the claw back work


 * A: ** The effort to retrieve the money that investors lost is called the clawback. The man who is in charge of the claw back is named Irving picard. He currently has around $3 billion dollars retrieved and hopes to retrieve the rest of the $50 billion by the end of the year.

Irving Picard Home Page