A French money manager who placed $1.4bn with Bernard Madoff was found dead yesterday in what New York police called an apparent suicide as the financial industry continued to reel from Mr Madoff's alleged $50bn fraud.
Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, 65, chief executive of Access International Advisors, was pronounced dead at his Manhattan office, with cuts on both arms and wrists, and a box-cutter and pills nearby, police said.
No suicide note was found, but Raymond Kelly, New York police commissioner, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying: "Our investigative premise is that it was a suicide."
The Paris newspaper La Tribune said that Mr Magon de la Villehuchet had spent the last week trying to recover some of the funds lost to Mr Madoff.
The death was revealed as Switzerland's Union Bancaire Privée, the world's second-biggest investor in hedge funds, responded to the Madoff affair by taking steps that could reshape the US hedge fund industry. UBP invested in Mr Madoff through several so-called feeder funds.
In an internal memo, the Swiss company instructed managers of the $56bn that it has allocated in hedge funds to put in immediate redemptions for any fund that does not have independent administrators and custodians. Administrators value a fund's assets and communicate with investors. Third-party administrators are required in the UK, but not in the US. Mr Madoff acted as custodian of assets that were placed with him and had no external administrator because he ran a brokerage, rather than a formal hedge fund, several investors say.
Bill Brodsky, chief executive of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, said in an interview with the Financial Times that financial illiteracy among Securities and Exchange Commission staff helped make it easier for Mr Madoff to go undetected. He said the scandal showed that inspector-level staff at the SEC had not received enough training to enable them to check for fraud effectively. "The people doing the examinations have no clue what the right questions are to ask," Mr Brodsky said.
Mr Magon de la Villehuchet had spent a large part of his career in New York, where he once ran one of Credit Lyonnais' two securities operations in the city. Press reports credited him with bringing Credit Lyonnais together with Leon Black, founder of Apollo Management.
Apollo acted as an adviser to Credit Lyonnais in deals related to the bail-out of Executive Life, a Californian insurer that failed in the 1990s. Credit Lyonnais and other French companies paid out-of-court settlements after an investigation into violations of US regulations in the bail-out.
Reporting by Joanna Chung and Alan Rappeport in New York, Hal Weitzman in Chicago, and Peggy Hollinger and Scheherazade Daneshkhu in Paris
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