A French investment manager who ploughed 1.5 billion euros (2.1 billion dollars) into Bernard Madoff’s fraud-hit scheme was found dead Tuesday in his New York office, police say, in what a friend says was a suicide. Thierry de la Villehuchet, 65, was found dead shortly after 7:00 am (1200 GMT) Tuesday by a security officer of the Madison Avenue building that housed Access International, according to the New York police department. Villehuchet was the co-founder of Access International, which raised funds on European markets to invest with Madoff, the former Wall Street pillar now accused of running a multi-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. He “could not cope with the pressure following the outbreak of the scandal,” one of Villehuchet’s close friends told AFP in Paris, speaking on condition of anonymity. 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, added the friend. Villehuchet was “devastated” and feared his clients would turn against him in the courts, the source said. “Access was his whole life, and Madoff was a manager in whom he had complete trust. I lunched with him two weeks ago and he said, how lucky it was that Madoff was the only manager still doing well at the moment.” “A perfectly honest guy,” according to his friend, Villehuchet had “teams that recorded all of Madoff’s operations. He could not imagine those were fake documents.”
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