Former Merrill Lynch & Co executives Daniel Tully and Barry Friedberg said they lost money by investing with Bernard Madoff through a fund started by another ex-colleague, John "Launny" Steffens.

The former executives may be among the highest-level Wall Street executives to reveal they were duped by Madoff, 70, who was arrested on Dec 11 after saying he'd been using money from new investors to pay off old ones in a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Both said they had "very little" invested with Madoff.

"It's not going to affect what I do with my life," Friedberg, 68, Merrill's head of investment banking when he left the firm in 2002, said in an interview. "One cannot have anything but very bad feelings about" Madoff, whom he'd never met or heard of before the scandal broke. "He's hurt a lot of people very badly and it's unfortunate."