Liquidating Bernard L. Madoff’s defunct brokerage has cost $774.8 million, including lawyers’ and consultants’ fees and expenses of $737.1 million, the trustee for the firm said in a report. Irving H. Picard, who has been liquidating the firm since Madoff’s December 2008 arrest, has paid customers about $4.6 billion, out of as much as $20 billion he says they lost in the Ponzi scheme. Another $802 million went to customers from the Securities Investor Protection Corp., which spent almost as much picking up the lawyers’ and consultants’ bills, according to the report filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan. More on Bloomberg here.
