Participants in the Madoff investment scandal the receiver assigned to Madoff's Ponzi scheme, extracted a settlement from Tremont worth over one billion dollars. A $1 billion class-action federal lawsuit was filed in Colorado against Fiserv, Inc. of Brookfield, Wisconsin whose subsidiaries were custodians for pension or IRA accounts and invested with Madoff. The complaint alleges Fiserv failed "to hold and safeguard assets entrusted to it" by about 800 Madoff customers who had been told to hire Fiserv to handle their accounts with him. Fiserv is accused of breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, negligence and aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary. Fiserv sold its investment account administration
Egyptian pyramid construction techniques a levering device to work complementary with Mark Lehner's idea of a combined ramp and levering techniques. Houdin's father was an architect who, in 1999, thought of a construction method that, it seemed to him, made more sense than any existing method proposed for building pyramids. To develop this hypothesis, Jean-Pierre Houdin, also an architect, gave up his job and set about drawing the first fully functional CAD architectural model of the Great Pyramid. His/their scheme involves using a regular external ramp to build the first 30% of the pyramid, with an "internal ramp" taking stones up beyond that height.