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WASHINGTON (AFP) - - A French investment manager who ploughed 1.5 billion euros (2.1 billion dollars) into Bernard Madoff’s fraud-hit scheme was found dead Tuesday in his New York office, police say, in what a friend says was a suicide.

Thierry de la Villehuchet, 65, was found dead shortly after 7:00 am (1200 GMT) Tuesday by a security officer of the Madison Avenue building that housed Access International, according to the New York police department.

Villehuchet was the co-founder of Access International, which raised funds on European markets to invest with Madoff, the former Wall Street pillar now accused of running a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

He “could not cope with the pressure following the outbreak of the scandal,” one of Villehuchet’s close friends told AFP in Paris, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Villehuchet was managing some two billion euros (2.79 billion dollars) for European clients, of which three quarters had been invested with Madoff when the scandal broke, added the friend.

Villehuchet was “devastated” and feared his clients would turn against him in the courts, the source said.

“Access was his whole life, and Madoff was a manager in whom he had complete trust. I lunched with him two weeks ago and he said, how lucky it was that Madoff was the only manager still doing well at the moment.”

“A perfectly honest guy,” according to his friend, Villehuchet had “teams that recorded all of Madoff’s operations. He could not imagine those were fake documents.”

Prosecutors say that Madoff, 70, has confessed to losing upward of 50 billion dollars over years of running a pyramid scheme, where new investors were secretly fleeced to pay returns to earlier investors, in what may be the biggest scam in Wall Street history.

Madoff, former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market and a mainstay of the powerful American Jewish community, is currently free on bail of 10 million dollars as police continue their probe.

After the affair was revealed on December 11, Villehuchet was “crushed” and feared that his clients would sue him, the friend said.

“I had known him since 1992. He was one of a kind, a very warm, hard-working man.”

Married without children, Villehuchet “was a man of honor and humor, very funny, a keen sailor and suicide seems contradictory to the type of person he was,” long-time friend Marie-Monique Steckel, president of the French Institute-Alliance Francaise in New York, told AFP.

The Madoff scandal has already sent shockwaves through Madoff’s former clients around the world and underlined systemic problems at the heart of the US financial industry and the government agency meant to watch over it.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week announced a probe into how the financial regulatory body failed to detect the alleged fraud scheme despite a decade of warning signs.

Only about 60 percent of those affected by the Madoff scandal have been identified so far.
source YAHOO