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Exhibit #8,492,299 why companies should start listening to their risk managers.
Senior executives at JPMorgan Chase expressed serious doubts about the legitimacy of Bernard L. Madoff’s investment business more than 18 months before his Ponzi scheme collapsed but continued to do business with him, according to internal bank documents made public in a lawsuit on Thursday.
On June 15, 2007, an evidently high-level risk management officer for Chase’s investment bank sent a lunchtime e-mail to colleagues to report that another bank executive “just told me that there is a well-known cloud over the head of Madoff and that his returns are speculated to be part of a Ponzi scheme.”
Then again, it’s not altogether surprising that a financial firm would bury its head in the sand as long as money was still coming in and the risk ultimately did not fall on its shoulders. I feel like we’ve seen that somewhere else on Wall Street in the past few years.
Despite those suspicions and many more, the bank allowed Mr. Madoff to move billions of dollars of investors’ cash in and out of his Chase bank accounts right until the day of his arrest in December 2008 — although by then, the bank had withdrawn all but $35 million of the $276 million it had invested in Madoff-linked hedge funds, according to the litigation.
The Madoff saga continues to unfold.
Risk Management Magazine and Risk Management Monitor. Copyright 2012 Risk and Insurance Management Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
