Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Bernie Madoff’s investment firm, asked a judge to pay him and his firm $43.2 million for four months of work, as well as about $5.5 million in deferred fees. In the filing, Picard said he would bill the Madoff estate. But an audit report in March found that high fees in the liquidation of the firm could deplete the $2.5 billion fund of customer property the Securities Investor Protection Corp., a reserve fund mandated by Congress to protect customers of insolvent brokerage firms. Picard has filed more than 1,000 suits on behalf of investors and recovered more than $7.6 billion, out of about $17 billion in principal lost. [Bloomberg]
