Pyramid games

“If you start blabbing, we’re going to break your neck”. The chilling message that was passed on to a high ranking bank insider when he wrote to his directors warning that Bernie Madoff was a fraud. The man did not talk, but the paperwork he sent them proved his bank was at the heart of the Madoff fraud and not only profited, but was actively involved in spreading the Ponzi scheme worldwide. That paperwork ended up in the hands of the British journalist Michael Leidig. He discovered it showed not only the bank's involvement, but also the involvement of politicians working at the highest level of government. The stage for this new drama was not Wall Street or the City of London, it was played out among the cobbled streets and pavement cafes of a city that was at the heart of Cold war intrigue after the war. A city which as the Orson Welles classic the Third Man highlighted was then, as it still is today, the spying capital of the world. That city that is the Austrian capital, Vienna.
Madoff was like a cancer in the banking world and he has now been removed. But the other tumours, his enablers, are still festering in the rest of the body of the global financial community. They are carrying on while his victims, the pension funds, charities and ordinary men and women who lost everything in the aftershock of his terrible deeds have been reduced to penury. But the whistle blower’s paperwork that was handed to the journalist was not simply posted on WikiLeaks, it was analysed and written up in this book, Pyramid Games, that has now been presented to the Austrian Parliament with a call for action. That presentation has allowed those with questions to answer to be named, the individuals and the financial institutions they worked with. These were organisations that despite pumping millions into creating the structures that allowed the Madoff fraud to last for so long, have NEVER been named, at least not until now. Through it, Austrians realised for the first time that the all-powerful AVZ, guardian of the pensions of the city of Vienna, and Bank Austria, had actively worked together with Austria’s woman on Wall Street, Sonja Kohn, to create an elaborate network of funds, trusts and off shore constructions to launder Madoff cash, and walk away with their reputations, and bank accounts, intact when it all came crashing down.
Bernie Madoff claimed in his trial he acted alone, the Madoff trustee trying to claw back the billions he stole says this is a lie, and named Sonja Kohn as his “criminal soul mate”. Now Pyramid Games has named the others, and claims that if Bernie Madoff was the devil, then he had willing disciples that helped him to ruin so many lives.