Body of Lies

Dec 22 2008 (Reuters) - Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, said it had no direct investments in a firm managed by Bernard Madoff, a newspaper reported on Monday.
ADIA was denying a New York Times report which said the fund had "entrusted some $400 million" in a firm of the U.S. fund manager accused of running a $50 billion fraud.

ADIA said it had invested $132 million three years ago in a fund that had partial investment in Madoff's Investment Securities, which could have suffered some losses, al-Ittihad newspaper reported.

"ADIA affirmed that is has not invested directly in Investment Securities," the Arabic-language daily reported.

Madoff, who U.S. authorities say confessed to running a $50 billion fraud, was put under 24-hour detention in his apartment on Friday.

Madoff also agreed to the extension of court orders freezing his assets and the appointment of a receiver for his firm as investigators pored over masses of documents and conducted interviews into an alleged scam that has caused losses for charities and businesses around the world.


Madoff feeder fund liquidators sue ADIA for $300 million over redemptions

Apr 7, 2011 The National
Lawyers overseeing the liquidation of one of Bernard Madoff's so-called "feeder funds" have filed suit against the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), seeking to recover US$300 million (Dh1.1 billion) allegedly redeemed more than five years ago.

The suit is one of more than 200 cases filed by lawyers overseeing the liquidation of Fairfield Sentry, a fund that solicited investments across the globe that were then pumped into Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

Fairfield Sentry's liquidators are seeking money they allege ADIA withdrew in 2005 and 2006, plus interest and court expenses.

Several investors from the region, including some from Bahrain and the UAE, have been singled out in cases involving Madoff's scheme as a result of investments they made and exited years ago - well before the scheme was exposed.

Madoff's Ponzi scheme imploded in December 2008 and the disgraced financier is now serving a 150-year sentence.

The suits, filed by the feeder fund and a group of lawyers overseeing its liquidation, are part of a complex chain of cases originating with Madoff's bankruptcy proceedings.

So-called clawback suits against investors who left Madoff's scheme before its collapse have become a controversial part of legal proceedings aimed at compensating victims who kept their money with Madoff until the end and lost billions of dollars.

Irving Picard, the trustee in Madoff's main bankruptcy case, has filed his own set of clawback suits against the feeder funds, including a $3.2bn claim against Fairfield Sentry.

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FOUR months ago (March 2011) some prominent citizens of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) addressed a petition to the country’s ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan. Couched in elaborate terms of courtesy, it noted that the UAE’s constitution calls for progress towards “a complete system of representative democracy”. Perhaps, they suggested, his highness might consider turning the Federal National Council (FNC), a legislative body with limited powers that is half appointed and half chosen by a select college of voters, into a real parliament elected by universal suffrage.

The government has shown no sign of changing the FNC’s toothless mandate to “discuss” legislation into anything like lawmaking. More to the point, several of the 133 original petitioners complain of receiving anonymous death threats. Five of them, including well-known bloggers and a distinguished economics lecturer, have languished in jail since being arrested in early April. Charged with threatening national security and insulting the UAE’s rulers, they may face five years behind bars. A crowd of government supporters mobbed a preliminary court hearing in mid-June to heckle them as “traitors” and “Iranian agents”, in what looked like a staged echo of similar taunts from loyalist commentators in the local press.

Many are perplexed by what appears to be a mounting campaign against even mild dissent. Consider, for instance, the fate of two of the country’s oldest civil-society institutions, the teachers’ and lawyers’ associations. On April 6th they issued a joint statement appealing for greater democracy. Within a month the government had dissolved both organisations’ elected boards and replaced them with state appointees. In June the Gulf Research Centre, a respected privately funded think-tank that has been based for more than a decade in Dubai, one of the UAE’s seven statelets, regretfully announced it was closing its offices owing to the government’s unexplained failure to renew an operating licence. Other academic and research bodies complain of increasingly intrusive government scrutiny, particularly of any activity related to political reform.

A recent report by the New York Times on an effort by Sheikh Muhammad bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi’s crown prince and the brother of its ruler, to create a crack battalion made up of foreign mercenaries has worried the reformers even more. An 800-man contingent is apparently to be trained in, among other things, crowd-control tactics against unarmed civilians.

The UAE sent some 500 police to bolster Bahrain’s Sunni ruling family in a bloody surpression of unarmed civilians.

Dubai’s success also brought cachet to its model of freewheeling economics and an open society. This has spurred many of the emirates’ royals to take a harder political line and to heed the criticism, long whispered in Abu Dhabi, that Dubai’s openness, particularly to a huge influx of foreign workers, endangers its status quo.

Yet the openness was also to ideas, including political ones. In the longer run, a lack of those may prove to be the bigger threat.