2 Banks to Send Madoff Trustee $535 Million

The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and JPMorgan Chase & Company have agreed to transfer about $535 million to the trustee liquidating the brokerage of Bernard L. Madoff, the man accused of engineering a global Ponzi scheme, according to court documents filed Thursday.

In the filings in United States Bankruptcy Court in New York, the trustee and the banks asked a judge to approve the transfers at a hearing on Feb. 4.

The move is part of the trustee’s effort under the Securities Investor Protection Act to gather assets to be returned to defrauded investors.

Bank of New York Mellon would send a wire transfer of about $301.4 million, and JP Morgan Chase would send about $233.5 million to the court-appointed trustee by Feb. 6, the documents said. The accounts are held by Mr. Madoff’s brokerage company.

A New York lawyer, Irving H. Picard, is the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, which collapsed after Mr. Madoff was arrested and charged last month with securities fraud.

Mr. Madoff, a former chairman of the Nasdaq stock market, is under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance in his luxury Manhattan apartment as criminal and civil authorities investigate his global operations, which are said to have lost $50 billion.