Federal prosecutors have notified a New York court that they also want the assets of Bernard Madoff’s wife.
In a court filing, the government said it will seek the $7-million Manhattan penthouse as well as another $62-million that Ruth Madoff had sought to keep.
The 70-year-old Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges he orchestrated the biggest financial swindle in Wall Street history, cheating investors out of billions of dollars in a fraud whose magnitude shocked the public and drew demands for stricter regulations.
”I cannot adequately express how sorry I am for what I have done,” he said as he pleaded guilty to 11 criminal charges.
Madoff, the disgraced money manager and former Nasdaq stock market chairperson, described a long-running scheme that he knew from the beginning was ”criminal and wrong” but hoped would end shortly.
As he become more deeply engaged in the fraud, ”I realised that my arrest and this day would inevitably come,” he said in a Manhattan federal courthouse where victims of his Ponzi scheme were invited to speak.
Madoff’s lawyers had indicated earlier that they planned to claim Ruth Madoff was entitled to keep as much as $69 million in assets.
They said the assets were not part of Madoff’s fraud and that they were in her name. — Sapa-AP and Reuters