The owners of the New York Mets will be forced to pay no more than $386 million to resolve claims by a trustee collecting money for investors who lost billions of dollars in Bernard Madoff’s fraud. Southern District Judge Jed S. Rakoff noted the figure in an order issued yesterday. The figure slices more than $600 million off the $1 billion award requested by court-appointed trustee Irving Picard of Baker & Hostetler in a lawsuit that accused the team’s owners of turning a blind eye to the fraud perpetrated by the now-jailed financier. Judge Rakoff tossed out most of the claims in a decision issued Tuesday.
Judge Rakoff said the $386 million consists of $83.3 million in fictitious profits accumulated by the Mets’ owners in the two years before a bankruptcy court filing occurred. It also includes more than $300 million in principal that Mr. Picard maintains the Mets received during the two-year period. In his written opinion Tuesday, the judge said Mr. Picard could only recover principal if he can prove that the Mets’ owners knew about the fraud. The lawsuit had claimed that the owners either knew or should have known that Mr. Madoff was operating a multi-decade fraud.
