British look into Madoff payments to banker
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LONDON - British authorities have started an investigation into millions of dollars of payments from the operations of the convicted money manager Bernard L. Madoff to companies linked to the Austrian banker Sonja Kohn, an Austrian official confirmed yesterday.
The Serious Fraud Office had asked Austrian prosecutors in May for help in investigating payments made by Madoff’s London office for research reports by Bank Medici, which was majority-owned by Kohn, who also served as its chairman.
“We’re closely cooperating with the SFO and the US Justice Department in that case,’’ the official, Gerhard Jarosch, a senior public prosecutor in Austria, said yesterday. A separate investigation by the Austrian prosecutor into whether Kohn and Bank Medici were involved with Madoff is continuing, he said.
Prosecutors are looking into whether Madoff paid more than $40 million to Kohn in exchange for turning three Bank Medici funds into feeder funds for his business, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing affidavits filed by prosecutors in the United States and Britain. The Austrian daily Der Standard reported last week that Kohn received about $11.5 million, for research reports for which prosecutors were unable to find receipts.
