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Ariel, Bard, and Merkin…

… the Madoff thing’s getting positively Shakespearean.

Bard College, a liberal-arts school in New York State’s Hudson Valley, lost about $3 million in investments related to Bernard Madoff.

The losses involved $11 million of Bard’s $270 million endowment that the college invested in the Ariel Fund, managed by J. Ezra Merkin, Bard President Leon Botstein said today in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. Merkin was introduced to the school by the late Leon Levy, a Bard trustee who founded OppenheimerFunds Inc., and serves as a governor of Bard’s Levy Economics Institute, Botstein said. [Bit confusing there. If Levy’s late, how can he serve?]

Bard believed about a fourth of its Ariel investment was in cash, Botstein said. Instead, it was invested with Madoff without the school’s knowledge, he said.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Botstein said. “We never knowingly invested with Madoff. We invested with Ezra Merkin.”…

Margaret Soltan, January 5, 2009 4:05PM
Posted in: merkins

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5 Responses to “Ariel, Bard, and Merkin…”

  1. tzvee Says:

    It’s Levy who is late and Merkin who is servin’ … much to our chagrin

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    tzvee: You’re right. I didn’t see the comma.

  3. dave.s. Says:

    A partner in a local law firm has been asked by a university client what is involved in declaring exigency. Exigency?! Financial exigency turns out to be what you need to declare to break tenure. Yikes!

  4. tzvee Says:

    don’t tease. which university?

  5. dave.s. Says:

    I’m not teasing. My informant didn’t tell me which U.

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