Moreover, to a certain extent -- actually to a major extent -- SIPC is lying with figures here. It says it has determined 13,189 claims. But it also says later that there were 8,489 claims (of the 13,189) that were denied because the claimants had no accounts at Madoff, i.e., were indirects. It should have taken about one day to determine an indirect claim, since they are denied out of hand. Since the average period for a determination is 7 months, and the indirect claims that are currently deniable out of hand -- in a day -- are roughly two-thirds of all the claims that have been determined, this further evidences how much delay there has been in determining direct claims -- even where they have been determined. And one would bet that most of the 3,185 claims remaining to be determined are directs' claims.
Beyond this, SIPC's answers give the average period between the filing of a claim and the determination of the claim, not the time between the filing of a claim on which SIPC admits it owes some amount and the payment of the claim. If we were to learn the average time between filing and payment, you can bet it would be more than 7 months. Ultimately it is likely to be years. This is what Congress meant when it said it wanted SIPC's payments to be prompt?
SIPC also says, in an effort to show how caring it is towards people who are suffering greatly, that "Hundreds of customers filed hardship applications" seeking quick payments, and "many" of these were granted. (P. 7.) "Many" is a lawyer's weasel word. (Twenty would be "many.") SIPC does not say how many were granted. It does not give a specific number, which it obviously knows. Instead it weasels. This is a sign that the number of hardship applications it granted isn't very high.
H. Finally, SIPC has set forth a chart showing the annual cash put in and the annual cash taken out for each year from 1992 through 2008. Most of the time the annual cash-in and cash-out are pretty close, although there were a few years when cash-out exceeded cash-in by (usually) a small amount, so that a certain amount of the cash-out had to come from "reserves" from prior years. But discrepancies between annual cash-in and cash-out appear to have become significant, sometimes in one direction and sometimes in the other, from 2003 onward, with about $2.8 billion more in cash-in in 2007 and $4.25 billion more in cash-out in 2008.
But eyeballing the chart as a whole (eyeballing, rather than carefully comparing all numbers), one gets the impression that much of the time the cash-in and the cash-out were reasonably close. This likely indicates that in the years of reasonable closeness Madoff was taking out for himself and his cronies -- Picower, Chais, probably Norman Levy -- an amount that was approximately equal to the difference between the year's cash-in and the final total of cash-out for the year. Otherwise, could there have been the degree of correspondence which often existed between annual cash-in and annual cash-out?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
