Ruth Madoff must report spending over 100 dollars

Ruth Madoff must report spending over 100 dollars New York - The wife of convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff must give a monthly accounting of her spending to a court-appointed trustee, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Ruth Madoff, who gave up her claim to Madoff's 80-million-dollar estate and instead has kept just 2.5 million dollars, would have to report any spending over 100 dollars to the trustee seeking to regain funds of investors bilked by her husband.

She was sued last week, with the court-appointed trustee for her husband's bankrupt investment company saying that she in the last six years had received 45 million dollars, which should be returned to the firm for compensation of fraud victims in the case. The agreement that requires her to report her spending habits came as part of that lawsuit, the Journal reported.

Bernard Madoff was arrested in December and pleaded guilty in March to running a pyramid or "Ponzi" scheme worth some 65 billion dollars, under which his firm paid huge returns to old investors by collecting money from new ones. The scheme had been going since at least the 1990s.

In June, Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison - the judge said that he handed out the longest possible term in keeping with the "unprecedented" fraud Madoff committed. The financier responsible for Wall Street's biggest investment fraud was transferred in July to a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, and is expected to remain in prison for the rest of his life.(dpa)