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Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Madoff Investor Dead in Apparent Suicide
Kathryn Vasel and Dunstan Prial
FOXBusiness
A hedge fund manager who invested with Bernard Madoff was found dead at his Madison Avenue office today in New York City, an apparent suicide.
Police confirmed that Rene-Thierry de La Villehuchet, 65, co-founder and chief executive officer of Access International Advisors, was found at his desk in his office at 509 Madison Ave. at about 7:25 a.m. He was pronounced dead about 8 a.m.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said de La Villehuchet was discovered with cuts from a boxcutter to his wrists and biceps.
Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, said an autopsy will be conducted on Wednesday to determine the exact cause of death.
Madoff, a New York-based money manager, is accused of running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. He was charged with securities fraud on Dec. 12 and released on $10 million bail, and now is under house arrest in his apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Access International announced a day after Madoff's arrest that some of its funds were invested with Madoff. In a letter to clients, the firm said its Luxalpha Sicav fund had $1.4 billion invested exclusively with Madoff.
The firm described Madoff's alleged admission that his investment firm was a giant Ponzi scheme as "a shocking development."
Access International is located on the 22nd floor of 509 Madison. More than a dozen reporters lined the sidewalk outside the building Tuesday afternoon. A wreath was hanging on the front door. No one answered the phone at Access International's offices.
A relative of de La Villehuchet's told La Tribune, a French business daily, that de La Villehuchet "could not cope with the pressure following the outbreak of the scandal. He took his own life, this morning, in his office in New York. This is a farewell from someone who had done nothing wrong."
"The truth is that everyone wanted to invest with Madoff, considered by everyone to be AAA, i.e. absolute security," the relative added, according to the newspaper.
de La Villehuchet had been trying for a week to recover the funds that Access International raised in Europe and invested through Madoff's business, La Tribune reported.
de La Villehuchet, 65, was a founding partner and chief executive officer of Access International. The firm was jointly founded by Patrick Littaye and de la Villehuchet. The hedge fund reportedly used intermediaries with links to the cream of Europe's high society and jet set to attract clients.
Investors in the Luxalpha Sicav fund included a unit of the Rothschild Group, the venerable European banking firm.
A former chairman and CEO of Credit Lyonnais Securities USA, de La Villehuchet was known as a talented sailor who regularly participated in regattas.
The Wall Street Journal reported that de La Villehuchet once worked for the capital markets division of Credit Lyonnais S.A. as founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Credit Lyonnais Securities (U.S.A.), according to a 1994 news release from the firm.
"Mr. de La Villehuchet's leadership at CL Securities, his development of important relationships in the American investment community and his initiation of several highly successful fund ventures have been major contributions to the expansion of our Capital Markets group,” the news release said.
Prior to joining Credit Lyonnais, de La Villehuchet served from 1970 to 1983 in the capital markets division of the Paris-based Banque Paribas, according to the news release. In 1983 he founded Interfinance, a New York-based international brokerage firm, and served as its president until 1987.
A distant cousin, Elisabeth Magon de La Villehuchet, reached at her home near Paris, told the Wall Street Journal that de La Villehuchet "was a Britton, deeply attached to family values." The family owns a sprawling chateau in Plouer-sur-Rance, near Saint Malo in the province of Brittany in France.
De La Villehuchet started his Luxalpha fund in March 2004, according to Bloomberg News. The most recent data shows $1.4 billion in assets, all of it invested with Madoff. The fund’s objective was: “…to provide investors with an opportunity to invest mainly in transferable securities and to provide a consistent performance.”
Data indicates that, much like the steady returns for which Madoff was much sought after among international investors, the Luxalpha fund also showed remarkably consistent returns year after year. The 1-year return of Luxalpha compared to a basket of similar funds shows the Luxalpha managed a 6.84% gain this year, versus a decline of 41% for benchmark indexes.
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It's time to let you in on a dirty little secret: You may not own the stock you own. That's right, if you invest with a brokerage firm, the shares you bought are almost certainly not held in your name. Technically, they're held in the name of the Wall Street firm you do business with, hence the term "street name."
No, you haven't been robbed. Ultimately, the decision to hold shares on the books under a different name doesn't affect the economic ramifications for you. You¿re listed as the "beneficial owner," even though the firm is the official owner of the shares. But, you are giving up some rights, and investors concerned about good corporate governance might want to get that stock back in their own names.
Here's the problem: If your stock is technically owned by, say, Merrill Lynch, then Merrill Lynch gets to do things with it that might work against your wishes. Take short selling. Investors who want to sell shares short need to first borrow those shares. The lenders are often the big Wall Street firms that are handing out Street-name shares. So, if you feel that a company you own is a victim of aggressive short selling, chances are your own shares are being used to fuel the shorting.
Also, your brokerage firm can cast ballots on some corporate matters affecting a company without getting your input. Technically, this can only happen in votes considered ¿routine¿ by securities regulators. But, there's a big catch: some big events, like board elections, are considered "routine" under law.
The good news is that you can easily fix the Street name problem: Just request that your brokerage firm makes you the listed owner of the shares. If they refuse, find a new firm.
