Madoff liquidators eyeing luxury Antibes pad

Madoff

The Grant Thornton team charged with clawing back cash by locating, seizing and liquidating the assets of the Madoff family for UK creditors have targeted a luxury apartment in Antibes on the Cote D’Azur, France.

A US lawyer acting for Grant Thornton told Accountancy Age that the liquidator was investigating the property in the French resort. ‘There is a luxury flat in Antibes and we are trying to establish whether it was bought through the UK company,’ said Eric Lewis of Baach Robinson & Lewis.

Steve Akers, Mark Byers and Andrew Hosking of GT in the UK have already seized a vintage Aston Martin and The Bull, a 27-metre yacht, once moored in Antibes, which Lewis said was worth in the region of E5m (£4.2m). However, the liquidator of Bernard Madoff’s US operation also felt it had a right to assets bought through the UK operation, which caused some tension between the two sides.

The two camps hammered out an agreement last week in the US bankruptcy courts which will now see them work together with enforcement agencies including the SFO, the Financial Services Authority, US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.