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| Economy |
| Report: Madoff, ex-Hadassah chief financial officer had affair |
| 2009-08-14 |
| An accountant and former chief financial officer at Hadassah who lost all of her personal savings in Bernard Madoff's massive fraud revealed that she and the disgraced financier previously had an affair, Bloomberg News reported. The financial news agency reported that Sheryl Weinstein, 60, is publishing the account of her ties to Madoff in a book titled "Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me," on August 25. Weinstein was in the New York courtroom on June 29, when Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for operating the massive Ponzi scheme that defrauded and bankrupted dozens of investors. According to Bloomberg, Weinstein told the judge that she and Madoff met 21 years ago when she was chief financial officer at Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. "I now view that day as perhaps the unluckiest day of my life because of the many events set into motion that would eventually have the most profound and devastating effect on me, my husband, my child, my parents, my in-laws and all of those who depended on us," Weinstein said at the New York hearing, according to the report. In addition to disclosing the affair, Weinstein's book will include photographs and intimate descriptions of Madoff, Bloomberg reported, noting that the publisher said the book, which was ghostwritten, will run about 200 pages. Hadassah, which also lost millions in Madoff's scheme, in December lowered estimates of its losses. Hadassah initially said it had $90 million placed with Madoff, but clarified in a Dec. 29 letter that two thirds of that amount - $60 million - constituted the huge, but probably imaginary, profits that Madoff reported to the organization over two decades. The group's principal investment with Madoff, it said, totaled only $33 million. Another $7 million in Madoff funds, possibly real, possibly fraudulent, were donated by a French backer in 1988. |
| Posted by:tipper |