New information about a massive Wall Street fraud suggests that those affected include the rich and famous, as well as major U.S. and international financial institutions. The fraudulent scheme perpetrated by veteran Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff includes among its victims real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman, the foundation run by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and a charity started by movie director Steven Spielberg, according to The Wall Street Journal. Also affected are some of the world's biggest banking institutions, including Britain's HSBC Holdings PLC, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and Man Group PLC, Spain's Grupo Santander SA, France's BNP Paribas and Japan's Nomura Holdings. Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, was arrested Thursday in what prosecutors say was a $50 billion scheme to defraud investors. “There were a lot of very sophisticated people who were duped, and that happens a great deal when you've had somebody decide to be unscrupulous,” said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency in charge of monitoring investment funds like the one Madoff operated. The fallout from the scheme led a prominent fund manager in London to berate U.S. regulators for failing to detect the fraud. “I think now it is very difficult for people to invest in things that are meant to be regulated in America, because they haven fallen down in the job,” said Nicola Horlick, the manager of Bramdean Alternatives, which has 9 percent of its funds invested in Madoff's scheme. “All through the credit crunch this has been apparent,” Horlick added in an interview with the BBC. “This is the biggest financial scandal, probably, in the history of the markets,” she added.
