Mary Schapiro, Barack Obama's choice to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), previously appointed one of Bernard Madoff's sons to a regulatory body that oversees American securities firms.
It has emerged that in 2001, Ms Schapiro, currently chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), employed Mark Madoff to serve on the board of the National Adjudicatory Council — the division that reviews disciplinary decisions made by Finra.
Last week, Mark Madoff, with his brother, Andrew, were understood to have approached the authorities after their father apparently confessed to orchestrating a $50 billion securities fraud.
... Mark Madoff began working at his father's firm, Bernard L. Madoff Securities, in 1986. He was the third member of Mr Madoff's family to join the business, following his uncle, Peter Madoff, and his cousin, Charles Wiener, son of Bernard's sister, Sandra. Andrew Madoff, his younger brother, followed in 1988, and Roger and Shana, children of Peter Madoff, joined in the 1990s.
It emerged yesterday that Shana Madoff's relationship with her husband, Eric Swanson, is at the centre of an SEC probe. Mr Swanson is a former SEC attorney.
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That's not the Mark Madoff I knew.I can see that Madoff could have hidden his Ponzi scheme from a government agency, but from his own senior employees? Did they not notice in all that time what was going on, they must have been complicit or stupid. And it's not as if there weren't warning signs of what they were up to years ago.
