Artículo No 03 Madoff: bankers were 'complicit'

Ponzi scheme fraudster Bernard Madoff has said unnamed banks and hedge funds were "complicit" in helping him run his $50bn (£31bn) scam.

By Harry Wilson 6:43PM GMT 16 Feb 2011

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Speaking to the New York Times, Madoff, who was imprisoned for 150 years for defrauding investors of tens of billions of dollars, said many people in the financial world "had to know" that his fund was in fact a massive Ponzi scheme and described a culture of "willful blindness".

"The attitude was sort of, 'If you're doing something wrong, we don't want to know'," said Madoff in a series of interviews and emails from prison.

Madoff admitted he was amazed to find out from emails between bankers that have been revealed in recently launched lawsuits the level of suspicion he had aroused.

"I'm reading more now about how suspicious they were than I ever realised at the time," he said.

Talking about the funeral of his son Mark, who committed suicide in December, Madoff said he did not attend the funeral because he did not want it to turn into a "media circus".

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He continued to assert that noone in his family knew the true nature of his fund before he confessed to his crime two years ago in the wake of the financial crisis.