JPMorgan Chase bankers had concerns about Bernard Madoff for more than a decade but failed to inform US authorities, according to a damning assessment of the bank’s serial inaction by the US attorney for Manhattan.
The bank agreed on Tuesday to pay $2.6bn to head off a criminal prosecution and private litigation over its failures to act on its suspicions, some of which came more than a decade before Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was revealed.
It agreed to pay $1.7bn to the Department of Justice, $350m to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, $325m to Irving Picard, the trustee for the Madoff bankruptcy, and $218m to plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits.