New face emerges in Madoff scheme

It's Austrian banker Sonja Kohn, who is alleged to have played a central role in financing the massive Ponzi scheme. The trustee seeking money for victims of the fraud alleges that Kohn received tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from Madoff - and that $9.1 billion of the scam's stolen funds were directly attributable to Kohn, her family members, and their portfolio of feeder funds. "In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own," said the trustee, Irving Picard, who filed suit this afternoon asking for $19.6 billion in damages. From the NYT:

With a bouffant red wig and a combative personality, Ms. Kohn, now 62 years old, stood out in the discreet world of European private banking. Well connected in financial and government circles in Austria, she cultivated relationships well beyond her Mitteleuropean base, speaking at least four languages and possessing a gold-plated Rolodex of socialites, industrialists and financiers. Based in Vienna, Ms. Kohn traveled frequently to the Continent's financial centers in Zurich, Milan and London and more recently developed a base in the offshore hedge fund centers in the Caribbean.

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Ms. Kohn, a Vienna native, first met Mr. Madoff in 1985 when she was living in Monsey, N.Y., and working as a stock broker at Merrill Lynch. She was introduced to Mr. Madoff through an executive at Cohmad Securities, a Madoff-related brokerage firm that has also been sued by Mr. Picard. The lawsuit claims that Ms. Kohn knew from the beginning that Mr. Madoff was a fraud, and that she received secret kickbacks from him in exchange for feeding him cash from other investors. It contends that she had a secret agreement with Mr. Madoff in which he paid her a flat fee -- usually more than $6.5 million annually -- to solicit investors.

Kohn had a financial relationship with Bank Austria, and that apparently gave her a seal of legitimacy when recruiting investors, many of them in Eastern and Central Europe. She has not traveled to the U.S. since Madoff's arrest, and it's a pretty good bet that she's not about to now.