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Otros deportes

NY Mets owners sued over Madoff's Ponzi scheme


    NEW YORK (Reuters) - The owners of the New York Mets were accused of reaping $300 million of fictitious profits from Bernard Madoff's record Ponzi scheme, a lawsuit by the trustee seeking money for Madoff's victims said.

    In a sweeping 365-page lawsuit unsealed on Friday, the trustee, Irving Picard, said the partners at Sterling Equities, including the Mets' Fred Wilpon, "were simply in too deep -- having substantially supported their businesses with Madoff money -- to do anything but ignore the gathering clouds."

    Picard said the baseball team itself had 16 Madoff accounts from which it withdrew more than $90 million of bogus profits to fund day-to-day operations.

    Wilpon and Saul Katz, who are Sterling's co-founders, in a joint statement called Picard's lawsuit "an outrageous strong-arm effort" to coerce a settlement and ruin their reputations and businesses.

    They said they never knew or suspected that Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme, and will defend against the lawsuit.

    Wilpon repeated that he may sell part of the Mets as a result of Picard's litigation.

    The case is Picard v. Katz et al, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York.

    (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)