Participants in the Madoff investment scandal group of hedge funds owned by Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co, as well as, its parent companies in December 2010, seeking more than $2 billion and alleging that company executives ignored "obvious warning signs" that Madoff was running a fraud. Picard alleged that Tremont failed to do any meaningful review of Madoff's operations or purported investment results, blindly allowing Rye to turn over half its $6 billion in client assets to Madoff and losing half that money when the scheme finally collapsed. The payment of $1 billion to the Madoff truste, provided by Massachusetts Mutual Life as a loan to
Loans for shares scheme it". The scheme has been perceived by many as unfair, and it is the loans-for-shares scheme that gave rise to the class of Russian business oligarchs, who have concentrated enormous assets, further increasing the wealth gap in Russia and contributing to the political instability. Furthermore, in the medium-term, this scheme significantly hurt Russian growth since the oligarchs realized that their purchases could be seen as fraudulent by future governments and thus they attempted to strip assets from the government enterprises rather than build them up. Loans for shares scheme Beginning in 1995, Boris Yeltsin's government began privatizing state-owned shares in