We weren’t crooked… just maybe a little incompetent

By Walker Duncan Posted on April 30, 2009 at 12:18 pm

Highly embattled feeder fund the Fairfield Greenwich Group, co-founded by hometown boy Walter Noel, has fired back over fraud accusations from Massachusetts regulators for its role in the Bernard Madoff debacle.

The company stands by its monitoring of its now-evaporated Sentry funds and claims PricewaterhouseCoopers consistently turned in clean audit reports when it examined them. They claim they were simply duped like everyone else.

However, judging by conversations we’ve had with hedge fund managers who did not invest with Madoff due to his complete and utter lack of transparency, FGG’s chances of convincing the world it was paying close enough attention are not high.

More detail is available here.

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Tags: Bernard L. Madoff, Fairfield Greenwich Group, financial institutions, financial regulation, fraud, governmental investigations, hedge funds, investment management, Walter Noel  

Nashville native sued over Madoff role

By Geert De Lombaerde Posted on April 1, 2009 at 12:20 pm

Massachusetts’ securities regulator is taking on Walter Noel and his Fairfield Greenwich asset management business. Noel, a graduate of MBA and Vanderbilt, led an investment team that, over the course of two decades, placed more than $7 billion of client money with Bernie Madoff.

Fairfield kept a database of standard responses for investors who questioned how safe the Madoff funds were, according to the complaint. In one response, Fairfield told concerned investors that Citco, the main clearinghouse for hedge fund transactions, had not been charged with verifying Madoff’s assets, but reassured them that there was adequate due diligence on the Madoff funds…

SEE ALSO: Noel’s assets are now on ice.

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Tags: Bernard L. Madoff, Fairfield Greenwich Group, financial regulation, fraud, investment management, Massachusetts, Ponzi schemes, white-collar crime  

VF puts homeboy Noel back in his place

By E. Thomas Wood Posted on March 5, 2009 at 1:07 pm

Walter Noel, the Nashville native whose high-flying investment firm appears to be the biggest loser in the Bernard Madoff megafraud, gets the full kitty-can-scratch treatment, along with his family, in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. A representative graf:

Several people have observed that, after the Noels got really rich, they began to be perceived as irritating people who were not so welcome in the places where they bought new houses—in Southampton, Palm Beach, and Mustique: the world’s richest and snootiest communities, widely known to be minefields for the socially ambitious.

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Tags: Bernard L. Madoff, comeuppances, Fairfield Greenwich Group, Ponzi schemes, Walter Noel