'He's a crook': Elie Wiesel's anger at $15m Madoff loss

"We must have spoken about ethics. Yes, ethics." Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner, recounted with a chuckle the ironic dinner conversation he had had 20 years ago with Bernard Madoff, the man who went on to swindle him out of $15.2m (£10.7m).

Away from Hollywood, which has also been touched by Wall Street's biggest fraud, Mr Wiesel is the most prominent victim of Mr Madoff's $50bn pyramid scheme, and he has spoken for the first time since his tormentor's confessed to his family, to damn him as "a crook, a thief, a scoundrel, a criminal".

The 80-year-old Holocaust survivor, whose writing, teaching and charitable work led the Nobel committee to call him a "messenger to mankind", said Mr Madoff's friend had made no heavy sales pitch to him on the occasions that they met. "We spoke about education, not the economy," he said. "Was he already a crook? Probably."

It was left to friends of Mr Madoff to suggest that Mr Wiesel put first his own fortune and then the money from his charitable foundation with Madoff Investment Securities. Now it is all gone – just like the savings of thousands of others, from celebrities to charities, on several continents.

"We checked the people who have business with him, and they were among the best minds on Wall Street, the geniuses of finance," Mr Wiesel said. "I am not a genius of finance. I teach philosophy and literature – and so it happened." Mr Madoff, it is now known, constructed an elaborate fiction over more than a decade, declaring himself to have found a secret way to make double-digit percentage profits. But the complicated statements he sent to his clients were nonsense. For at least 13 years, he never invested a single cent, using money coming in from new clients to pay those cashing out.

Mr Wiesel was speaking at a panel discussion chaired by the editor of Portfolio magazine, and was asked what he wants to happen to Mr Madoff, who is currently under house arrest at his Manhattan penthouse.

"I would like him to be in a solitary cell with a screen," the philanthropist said. "And on that screen for at least five years of his life, every day there should be pictures of his victims, one, after the other."

Clients of Madoff Investment Securities were told they had balances totalling about $50bn. But when Mr Madoff confessed in December, there was less than $1bn. The scandal has unleashed global legal recriminations, with many Madoff-related lawsuits passing through the courts. Yesterday, the Swiss bank UBS beat off a demand for money from a Luxembourg investor it had steered to the fraudster. The day before, the town of Fairfield in Connecticut sued its auditor, KPMG, and its investment adviser for failing to spot the danger of putting $42m of its employees' pension fund with Madoff.

Criminal charges for Stanford's investment chief

One of cricket sponsor Sir Allen Stanford's top executives has been charged with obstructing justice – the first criminal case in the investigation into an $8bn (£5.6bn) fraud at his Antiguan bank. Laura Pendergest-Holt, on right of picture, the chief investment officer at Stanford International Bank and one of two people named with Sir Allen, below, in a US civil fraud case, is accused of lying about how much she knew of SIB's investments when US regulators questioned her under oath earlier this month. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that Sir Allen and others faked invest-ment returns and lied about assets at the stricken bank.