WORLD> Europe
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WORLD> Europe
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Alleged Madoff fraud hits Europe and Asia
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-12-15 23:26 LONDON -- Some of the world's biggest banking institutions and hedge funds reported potential huge losses on Monday as the impact of alleged fraud by arrested Wall Street investment manager Bernard Madoff spread far beyond US borders.
Britain's Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and Man Group PLC, Spain's Grupo Santander SA, France's BNP Paribas and Japan's Nomura Holdings all reported that they had fallen victim to Madoff's alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme. The extent of the potential damage, stretching also to several US charities who invested funds, prompted a leading fund manager in London to lash out at US regulators for failing to detect the fraud earlier. "I think now it is very difficult for people to invest in things that are meant to be regulated in America, because they haven fallen down in the job," Nicola Horlick, the manager of Bramdean Alternatives, which has 9 percent of its funds invested in Madoff's scheme, told the British Broadcasting Corp. "All through the credit crunch this has been apparent," Horlick added. "This is the biggest financial scandal, probably, in the history of the markets." Man Group, the world's largest publicly traded fund manager that reported exposure of around $360 million on Monday, said "it appears that a systematic and comprehensive fraud may have been committed, evading a range of structural controls." Around the world, investors who put cash into veteran Wall Street money manager Madoff's investment pool spent the weekend calculating how much exposure they might have. The 70-year-old Madoff, who had served as chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested Thursday in what prosecutors say was a scheme to defraud investors. |
