Already reeling from a lawsuit from the Madoff trustee seeking to recover as much as $1 billion, the New York Mets have now been hit on Friday with a downgrade by Moody's Investors Service on the team's stadium debt.
The new stadium, known as Citi Field, was built with debt issued by the New York City Industrial Development Authority. That, of course, has nothing to do with Bernard Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme. However, Irving Picard, trustee in the Madoff case, sued the owners of the Mets with having "consciously disregarded" danger signals about Madoff's operation. The suit was filed under seal in December of 2010, and was only made public on Feb. 4 after settlement talks failed.
Picard said in a 365-page complaint that partners at Sterling Equities, the company of Fred Wilpon, Mets chairman, had 483 accounts with Madoff's company. He added that the baseball team had 16 accounts with Madoff as well, from which more than $90 million was taken to finance the team's day-to-day operations.
In part, the complaint said, "The Sterling partners were simply in too deep—having substantially supported their businesses with Madoff money—to do anything but ignore the gathering clouds."
It went on to add, "Despite being on notice and having every resource at their disposal to investigate the litany of legitimate questions surrounding Madoff, the Sterling partners chose to do nothing."
