National Bank of Kuwait has fully reimbursed all its clients who lost money in the alleged $50bn Ponzi scheme run by New York broker Bernard Madoff

National Bank of Kuwait has fully reimbursed all its clients who lost money in the alleged $50bn Ponzi scheme run by New York broker Bernard Madoff, banking sources said.NBK paid about $50m to some 20 individuals who invested in Madoff feeder funds through its Swiss bank in December, one NBK executive said.The clients received the principal they initially put into the funds and the gains, said by authorities to be fictitious, they thought they had made. A bank spokesman declined to comment.
People close to NBK saw the measure as a way of strengthening its relationships with clients.The move puts pressure on other banks and fund managers whose clients lost money in the alleged fraud."Other banks should similarly acknowledge responsibility for investing their clients' monies in Madoff's fraudulent enterprise, and with the threat of reputational losses and litigation, we would not be surprised to see other banks doing right by their clients," said Mark Gross, of the US-based Pomerantz law firm, which represents European and US clients who lost money to Mr Madoff's operation.NBK had the advantage of having relatively small losses to cover compared with the $7.5bn and $3.2bn lost by the clients of US money managers Fairfield Greenwich and Tremont Group respectively.Santander, the Spanish bank that stands third on the list of reported Madoff losses with about $3.2bn, has offered to cover part of the losses of its private clients who sent money to Mr Madoff's operation through Santander's Optimal hedge fund arm.But Santander's offer covers only the principal invested and is in the form of preference shares, which some investors have argued are worth only 20 per cent of the face value of their original investment. Institutional investors are not included in the offer.People at several other banks with Madoff exposure took pains to distinguish themselves from NBK and Santander, where the investors who have been offered reimbursement were individuals with wealth management or private banking accounts.UBS and HSBC each served as custodians for Madoff feeder funds, and the UniCredit Madoff customers were institutional investors who invested through the Italian bank's Irish unit.