And in a letter to the court dated February 9th, Sheehan said the position of SIPC and the Trustee "with respect to net equity, recognize[s] the fundamental unfairness to permit "net winners' to share in the fund of customer property with the customers who have not yet been made whole."
So, it looks to me like my understanding of the position of SIPC and the Trustee is correct: the money one gets from SIPC - - up to $500,000, based on one's net equity- - is simply an advance on what one gets from customer property; net equity must therefore be defined in a way that prevents those who have taken out more than they put in from sharing in customer property and must therefore prevent them from getting an advance up to $500,000; an advance from customer property is not insurance; and Senators who said otherwise and (I will now add) who said the bill they were enacting provided insurance, did not know what they were talking about.
Now, there is a whole hell-hole of errors in the logic of SIPA and the Trustee. I will deal only with the most egregious of them. Our system, as said before, does not run on the basis that Senators and Congressmen who enact a bill don't know what they are talking about, and therefore governmental, quasi governmental or private bodies can do whatever they want whenever they think their desires are fair and that what Congress wanted is undesirable. It just doesn't work that way in this country. Yet that is what Sheehan has explicitly admitted his side is doing here. I would think condign punishment to be deserved. The more so because, as has been discussed often in this post, and as was at least implicit in previous quotes or comments made at the oral argument by Brian Neville, many believe that the position taken by SIPC and the Trustee, far from being fair, is disastrously un fair to thousands of people. The more so yet again because the Senators were right, as will be discussed below. There is insurance here.
Then too, it is obviously and completely wrong to say that the advance one receives from SIPC is merely an advance from customer property. The advance comes from a fund that Congress ordered SIPC to set up for this purpose (and which SIPC neglected to keep at a sufficient level). Indeed, the statute even explicitly says the Trustee shall pay net equity claims out of monies SIPC provides even though the debtor does not have sufficient funds to pay the claim. In SIPC cases there may never be enough customer property to cover the advances or even more than a very small part of them, yet victims still get the advances, thus showing that most or all of an advance will always remain just a payment from the Congressionally ordered fund, and not even conceivably, or in theory, a part of customer property. This happens all the time as far as I know - - or it would happen all the time but for SIPC's miscreant denials of money to (most) victims in most cases. And, because the $500,000 has to be paid from the SIPC fund regardless of whether there is enough customer property to cover any part of it, the advances are insurance, just as the Senators said. What SIPC and the Trustee are doing, in order to suit SIPC's selfish purposes, are that they are creating an intellectual invention, are making up a bubba meisse if my Yiddish is right, that an advance supposedly is customer property. It is not.
True, in setting forth the order of allocation of customer property, the statute says some of it will go first to SIPC for certain things, including certain repayments of monies that SIPC put out for customers, some will go to customers for certain things, SIPC will be subrogated to some of it, etc. But that SIPC can get some of the customer property money to cover what it previously gave to victims, or that the amount of money customers later get from customer property is reduced by advances on net equity that they previously received, does not mean the advances came from customer property, either in theory or in reality. On the contrary, both in theory and reality, the advances come from the SIPC fund set up for the purpose; later SIPC can recoup some of the advance in the (normally unusual, I believe) event that there is enough customer property for such recoupment; and victims have their payments reduced by the amount of net equity they already were given via an advance.
Additionally, the concept of net equity serves as a measurement. It measures whether a person can initially get up to $500,000, and it measures a victim's share of (usually-later-recovered) customer property. But that the same measure is used in both instances does not mean - - and it does not logically follow - - that the measure should be defined in a way that harms people who seek advances in order to help people who later will receive customer property - - which is precisely what SIPC and the Trustee are trying to do. Rather, the measure is what Congress said it is, and what SIPC therefore used for decades until it felt threatened with bankruptcy due to the size of the Madoff fiasco. The irony, of course, is that the people whom SIPC and the Trustee claim they wish to help by cash-in/cash-out (many or most of whom may be pretty well off anyway) may not see a nickel of recovered customer property for years on end - - for seven to ten years - - because of lengthy litigation over efforts to recover the property from Madoff confederates and similar types, that people in penury due to the actions of SIPC and the Trustee are hurt immediately and on into the foreseeable future, and that in many cases such people will not see better days because of Stengel's theorem; while people who will be helped, because the method adopted by SIPC and the Trustee will provide them with an enlarged share of customer property, will not receive that customer property for many years and in lots of cases are still pretty rich anyway. To put some of this briefly, claiming a desire to help victims, SIPC and the Trustee have adopted a calculation of net equity that will desperately hurt thousands now and into the foreseeable future, while not helping others for years and years.
As many will know, one day after the oral argument, Helen Chaitman wrote Judge Lifland a letter urging him to reach a compromise verdict that would, she said, accomplish Lifland's aim of not having customer property go to persons who had taken out of Madoff more than they put in. Let me quote her relevant two paragraphs.
I write on behalf of a very large group of investors in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, LLC ("Madoff") to suggest a partial resolution of the "net equity" issue. Mr. Sheehan's rebuttal ended yesterday with the passionate argument that it is unfair to investors with a positive net investment that investors with a negative net investment should share in the fund of customer property. There is a large group of investors who have a negative net investment, and many who have a positive net investment, who would forego any distribution from the fund of customer property if they were promptly paid their $500,000 in SIPC insurance. Hence, we ask the Court to consider incorporating this proposal into Your Honor's decision on the "net equity" issue.
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