Anyone see any connection?

From the UK Newspaper The Independent:

Bernie Madoff was able to con thousands of extra investors by using a British bank which “looked the other way” and ignored repeated warnings that he was engaged in a sophisticated fraud, according to the man charged with recovering their losses.

HSBC and its staff were accused of receiving “kickbacks for looking the otherway while legitimising BLMIS (Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities) through their name and brand, making it attractive to investors”.

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“Had HSBC and the defendants reacted appropriately to such warnings and other obvious badges of fraud … the Madoff Ponzi scheme would have collapsed years, billions of dollars, and countless victims sooner,” said Mr Picard. “The defendants were wilfully and deliberately blind to the fraud, even after learning about numerous red flags surrounding Madoff.”

Mr Picard wants to recover the $9bn from HSBC and a network of international funds that acted as “feeders”, enticing investors to place money with Madoff’s investment company. It makes the bank the biggest defendant so far, eclipsing lawsuits already filed against the Swiss bank UBS and America’s JP Morgan. Other defendants named in the HSBC suit include the Italian bank UniCredit and Austria’s Bank Medici.

The accusations levelled against HSBC will come as a huge embarrassment to a company which has become increasingly controversial, having threatened to quit London for Hong Kong should the Government seek to impose too heavy a levy against banks or attempt to break it up after the Independent Commission on Banking, set up by the Chancellor, reports next year.

However, suits against more European banks are likely to follow. The lawsuit, filed in the US Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, is the latest move by Mr Picard who has filed more than 100 lawsuits over the last few days in a bid to recover funds from those institutions which he claims enabled the fraud or those who received “false profits” by getting their money out of the scheme before it collapsed. Mr Picard faces a deadline of Friday – the two-year anniversary of Madoff’s arrest – to file everything.

and from the BBC News:

Questions have been raised about police handling of tuition fee protests after a car carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall was attacked.

A window was smashed and paint thrown at the vehicle as the royal couple made their way to a central London theatre.

Violent demonstrations spread after MPs voted to increase university tuition fees in England.

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The National Union of Students (NUS), meanwhile, said the violence had overshadowed the story it wanted to see in the newspapers.

Shane Chowen, vice-president of further education, said: “Not the headlines I wanted. I wanted to see the fact that the coalition government have just trebled tuition fees, sentencing a generation of students to record student debt.”

By Paul Handover