Madoff, Picard and Charities: A Tabular Comparison of the Wilpon/Katz Foundations to the Lautenberg Foundation - Part 1 - Installment 51
This is the fifty-first in a series of installments on this blog that are discussing issues arising in the aftermath of the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard L. Madoff (“Madoff”). Installments 49 and Installment 50 of this series and several prior Installments have discussed The Lautenberg Foundation, a private foundation (“Lautenberg”) formed by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, and its investment with Madoff.
Installment 46 and several prior installments discussed the Wilpon/Katz Family, who are best known as the owners of the New York Mets. The Installments revolved around potential exposure for “clawback” to Irving Picard, the Trustee in the Madoff bankruptcy (“Picard”) from investments by the Judy & Fred Wilpon Family Foundation, Inc. (“Wilpon”), and the Iris & Saul Katz Family Foundation, Inc. (“Katz” and collectively with Wilpon, “Wilpon/Katz”).
Each of Lautenberg and Wilpon/Katz (collectively, the “Foundations”) is a Section 501(c)(3) private charitable foundation. The Forms 990-PF filed by the Foundations with the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) for the years 2007, 2008 and 2009 (the “Foundations’ Forms 990-PF”), which have been the source of much of the information in the table below are available to the public for no charge on the charity information Web site GuideStar.
In the earlier cited Installments, there were suggestions that Picard may be dealing inconsistently with charities that invested with Madoff. The tabular comparison of Wilpon/Katz with Lautenberg in this Installment is helpful in analyzing, based primarily on the public information filed by the Foundations with the IRS, whether Picard is dealing uniformly with the Foundations and their respective founders.
A COMPARISON OF THE WILPON/KATZ AND LAUTENBERG
FORMS 990-PF
(Information in the Wilpon/Katz and Lautenberg columns is based primarily on the Forms 990-PF filed by the respective Foundations with the IRS, unless otherwise noted. The table below should be read in conjunction with the definitions, links and discussion in Installments 46 and 50 of this series.)
[To be continued in Installment 52]
(Michael J. Kline, Esq., the author of this entry and a co-author of this blog, is a partner with Fox Rothschild LLP, based in our Princeton, NJ office, and is a past Chair of the firm's Corporate Department. He concentrates his practice in the areas of corporate, securities, and health law, and frequently writes and speaks on topics such as corporate compliance, governance and business and nonprofit law and ethics.)
