The Madoff mistake

Today in the Tufts Daily: the risks of focusing solely on the bottom line. Perhaps if the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility was given full advisory power and the ability to communicate with the administration and the community as promised, we could have avoided this fiasco.

“The thing about Madoff is that people couldn’t get to him directly,” Economics Lecturer Chris McHugh said. “He was playing hard to get.”

It was this phenomenon, it appears, that led Tufts to entrust $20 million to the Ascot Partners hedge fund and pay the fund yearly fees, all in order to gain access to Madoff’s consistent 10 to 17 percent returns.

And until the foundations of Madoff’s carefully constructed ruse came crashing down, the results appeared encouraging. According to Director of Public Relations Kim Thurler, Tufts administrators were under the impression that the investment had accumulated returns in the neighborhood of $5.6 million since it was originally made in 2005.

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Laura Goldman, who runs the money management firm LSG Capital, called the university’s decision to invest through Ascot Partners and pay the associated fees irresponsible.

“They were fees way out of line for turning somebody over to somebody else,” she told the Daily. “[Tufts] should have said, ‘Listen, please introduce us to Madoff.’”

Dungan said that the university tried to skip the middleman, but like other potential investors, was turned away by Madoff.

“We … were told that Madoff was not taking any new separate accounts. Our only way to access this opportunity was through one of the various feeder funds,” she said in an e-mail.

But while the administration suggests that the front door was closed, Goldman said Tufts investors should have knocked harder. She argued that with a $20 million principal, the university could have found a way to avoid the middleman.

“Of course they could have called [Madoff],” she said. “When you’re the Tufts endowment, I think you can probably call Jesus Christ. That’s how the brokerage industry works.”

Goldman, a former Merrill Lynch employee who now operates out of Israel, met Madoff in the ’90s. She recently published an online account in which she describes the encounter, noting Madoff’s evasiveness and a plethora of red flags. After speaking with him, she recalls, she encouraged others to withdraw their investments from his accounts.

According to Goldman, Tufts too should have seen the warning signs. “Anyone who was at any time researching this knew something was wrong,” she said.

Maybe things didn't have to be this way. To invest in trustworthy, socially conscionable enterprises, and not get-rich-quick schemes, is the only way we can build a healthy and sustainable endowment worthy of our name.