How Much Was Picower Worth?

Dec 17, 2010

The last year that Jeffry Picower and his wife were on the Forbes list was in 2009. Forbes put their net worth at $1 billion. The Picowers weren’t even on the 2008 list, or the 2007 list or any other list that I could find before that.

In other words, according to Forbes, he wasn’t even a billionaire until 2009. (His 2009 entry lists his source of wealth as “Investments, Self-made”).

Now we hear that the Picowers were worth at least $7 billion, gained from years of huge profits from investing with Madoff. Some years Mr. Picower made 950% returns. Ms. Picower today reached a settlement with the trustee in the Madoff bankruptcy to hand over $7.2 billion that the family made from the Madoff fraud.

The big unanswered question is how much the family has left. Is it billions? Millions? Thousands?

Mr. Picower’s lawyer told Forbes that Mr. Picower was worth up to $7 billion at the time of his death. Forbes says it could have been much more, since Mr. Picower had as much as $3 billion in unrealized gains in investment accounts at the time of his death (he was found dead in his Palm Beach pool in 2009). Yet it’s unclear how much of that will go to the settlement.

Mr. Picower’s will left $200 million to his wife, $25 million to his daughter Gabrielle and $10 million in a trust for his longtime assistant April Freilich.

Regardless of the settlement, it appears Ms. Picower will have enough money to continue her philanthropy.

“We believe that following the settlement with the Madoff Trustee … the substantial assets acquired by Mr. Picower through his many successful investments over the years (separate from Bernard Madoff) will be available and sufficient to fund the new charitable foundation,” William Zabel, the Picower family lawyer, told Reuters.

Figuring out where to draw the legal line between ill-gotten gains and profits made legitimately off of some of those ill-gotten gains is, of course, difficult. Yet while Mr. Picard may have gotten “every penny” that the Picowers made from the Madoff fraud, it looks the family will have more than a few pennies left over.

UPDATE: Barbara Picower, through her lawyer, William D. Zabel of Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP, said the following as part of a prepared statement: “I am absolutely confident that my husband Jeffry was in no way complicit in Madoff’s fraud and want to underscore the fact that neither the Trustee nor the U.S. Attorney has charged him with any illegal conduct. I believe that the Madoff Ponzi scheme was deplorable, and I am deeply saddened by the tragic impact it continues to have on the lives of its victims. It is my hope that this settlement will ease that suffering.

“My late husband was a talented and active investor who had extraordinary successes in business investments during his career, which will allow me to make this settlement and return to the philanthropic work that was so important to Jeffry and me.”

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