There is, however, an interesting debate going on in the United States arising out of the Madoff disaster. What you see in these kinds of cases, particularly in the Ponzi scheme, is that so much of the distribution of the money that has been stolen from investors is done by the criminal himself. Often, at the very end of a Ponzi scheme, when the person realizes they're about to be arrested, they start to make large payments to various friends, relatives, and other people they want the money to go to. We saw that with Mr. Madoff, who, near the end, paid out very large sums of money to some of his favourite clients.
I've advocated for a number of years that what the law should do is to say to the victims of a Ponzi scheme that they are going to share in this loss together. What that would mean is that, if you were lucky enough to be paid back not only your principal but the enormous rate of return you'd been promised three months before the music stopped and there were no more chairs to sit down on, then we're going to allow you to keep your principal, but we're going to make you pay back for a period, I would say, of five years, if it went that long. Everyone who participated in it will get their money back, if they were paid out, but they will have to repay into the fund that would be established by the receiver any profit they made.
In a situation like the Earl Jones case in Montreal, you would significantly increase the amount of money that would be available for distribution to the injured group by requiring that the persons who were paid out shortly before the end of the fiasco were not entitled to essentially keep their gains.
It's interesting that in the United States a number of investors have sued for their profits. Knowing that it was a Ponzi scheme, they've started a class action wanting to be paid their profits even after they knew Mr. Madoff was stealing money from other investors.