Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz are celebrating their settlement agreement for $162 million with Madoff trustee Irving Picard today.
While that sounds like a lot of money (and it is), it was agreed upon that Wilpon/Katz don't have to make a payment until after three years, by which time they hope to recover a substantial portion of the $162 million they owe from their own "loser'' funds, which totaled $178 million.
Ironically, the Mets owners are now rooting for Picard to recover other money so they can win back a significant portion of the $178 million. Their hope is he can recover 70 percent of the money, which would mean $124.6 million would be coming back to the Mets' owners, leaving them only $37.4 million in debt.
All this adds up to a huge win for Wilpon and Katz, As for Mets fans, they may be less enamored with the deal since it keeps the Mets in the hands of Wilpon/Katz for the forseeable future.
While the settlement looks like a major score for the Mets' owners, it seems unlikely the Mets' team will do much winning this year with a payroll cut $50 million into the $90 million range and questions all over the field.
Picard gave up his long-shot try to prove the Mets' owners were "willfully blind'' toward the Madoff scheme, which might have entitled Picard to another $303 million, as that argument never stood a chance. There was no evidence Wilpon or Katz knew anything about the scheme, or really, mcuh at all securities investing. As it turns out, they a lot more about baseball than stocks and were just as foolish as the other 5,000 or so Madoff victims.
Picard and Wilpon/Katz instead agreed to go back six years instead of two to increase the Mets' owners debt to the Madoff trustee to $162 million from $83 million.
Picard once aimed to collect $1 billion from the Mets owners, so he didn't come close to collecting close to that from them. Mets owners now hope he'll do better in his other recovery plans.
As for the team's recovery plans, those remain very much up in the air.
