Massachusetts has said "no thanks" to the settlement the Fairfield Greenwich investment firm offered -- almost $6 million -- to investors who lost money in Bernard Madoff's huge Ponzi investment scheme.
A spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin says the agency won't accept Fairfield Greenwich Group's offer to fully refund almost a dozen Massachusetts investors because officials are still trying to identify everyone who was affected.
Galvin filed a civil fraud complaint against Fairfield Greenwich in April claiming Madoff coached officials on how to answer federal investigators' questions and that the officials misrepresented how much they knew.
Fairfield Greenwich disputes the allegations and said they want to settle the Massachusetts case to focus on more significant legal action that's pending.
"It would be irresponsible for Fairfield to devote any more time or resources to a case involving at most a dozen people with losses of $6 million, when Fairfield is facing litigation involving thousands of investors and hundreds of millions of dollars elsewhere," Fairfield Greenwich spokesman Thomas Mulligan said.
Fairfield Greenwich was a so-called "feeder funds" for Madoff. Galvin has said the firm invested more than 95 percent of its Sentry Funds' $7.2 billion in assets in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. The firm has said it made clear to investors that Madoff held substantially all of the Sentry funds' assets.
Madoff is serving 150 years in prison for defrauding investors in the multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.
