Lawyer for Madoff Trustee: We’ve Found $1 Billion

[WSJ_law_blog]

A lawyer for the court-appointed trustee liquidating Bernard Madoff’s firm said Monday they’ve located more than $1 billion of the disgraced financier’s assets.

According to a Dow Jones newswires story (link not available), In a recent court filing in the U.K., the trustee, Irving Picard (pictured) said he had recovered more than $946 million in cash and securities for customers of Madoff’s firm. And now he’s set his sights overseas. David J. Sheenan, a lawyer for Picard, said the trustee is seeking $75 million in Madoff assets held in Gibraltar. And at the same time, Sheenan said French authorities are moving to seize Madoff’s chateau in France, in order to satisfy claims by Madoff’s victims in France.

The villa in Cap d’Antibes, France, was valued at about $1 million, according to a statement of Madoff’s assets as of Dec. 31, 2008. Last week, U.S. prosecutors indicated they plan to seek the forfeiture of the villa in Madoff’s criminal case.

Click here for a Bloomberg story from January on the chateau. An interior designer who has worked on several of the properties, Bernard Collini-Lopes, called the 1300-square foot structure “suprisingly modest,” given what he knew of Madoff’s situation.

Also in the story, Collini-Lopes dropped this rather odd quote on his occasional encounters with Madoff. “I would see him holding hands with his grandchildren. He’d wave and say hello, and if he’d asked me to lend him 50 euros I probably would have done it,” Collini-Lopes said. “If he’d looked like Bruce Willis, people probably wouldn’t have trusted him. It’s silly, I know, but true.”