US authorities on Wednesday investigated the apparent suicide of a French investment manager who lost more than a billion dollars in Wall Street titan Bernard Madoff's alleged pyramid scheme, as the widening scandal took a tragic turn. Thierry de la Villehuchet, 65, was found dead in his Manhattan office early Tuesday with pills around him and his arm slit with a box cutter, the New York City Police Commissioner said.
City authorities carried out an autopsy Wednesday, though results would not be ready until next week pending the outcome of laboratory tests, New York medical examiner's office spokeswoman Ellen Borakov told AFP. The death of the French investor came amid more fallout from the scandal, which has seen at least 50 billion dollars in investments evaporate after its manager admitted earlier this month to running a fraudulent investment scheme.
"Now blood's on Bernie's hands," read the headline of the New York Post. Another major investor, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, also acknowledged losing 15 million dollars to Madoff - nearly all its assets. Villehuchet left no suicide note but friends suggested the aristocrat may have been wracked with guilt over encouraging colleagues and acquaintances to invest with Madoff, and losing some 1.4 billion dollars in client investments.
"Thierry got all his friends involved in this, the people who were closest to him, and he couldn't stand it," said his friend and fellow businessman Jean Karoubi. He was "undoubtedly naive but a man of honour," Karoubi added. As chief executive of Access International, 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 earlier this month, a source close to the fund manager said. Villehuchet was "devastated" and feared his clients would turn against him in the courts, the source said.
New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters late Tuesday that Villehuchet had cuts on his arm when he was found. "It appears that there were cuts made to his arm, to his wrist, and also to his bicep area with a box cutter. There were pills present; unknown if those pills were ingested," said Kelly. "There was no suicide note." His body was found early Tuesday by a security guard in the office building on New York's Madison Avenue where he worked.