Things started to look up for Ruth a couple of weeks ago, when it emerged that a trust originally formed by her late parents was being “looked after” by Bernie; the feds realised that she wouldn’t put her own money into a fraudulent scheme. She’ll be still watching her back though – the WSJ notes: “the agreement didn’t preclude future criminal charges or lawsuits by the Securities and Exchange Commission or attorney Irving Picard, the trustee of the defunct Madoff firm who is recovering assets for investors”. No doubt some wronged investors will try and come after her last $2.5m. Plus there’s the slightly damaging fact that she shifted millions from one account to another, and had jewellery sent to relatives, just before the news broke.

Those who lost money to Madoff can take heart from the news that $231m has so far been freed up to pay them back – under U.S. law, each victim can receive up to $500,000 from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Of course, this falls rather short of the nearly $3bn-worth of complaints filed resulting from the fraud; an additional $2.7bn has been “authorized for potential future recovery”, but that’s only going to materialise if Madoff’s assets can be somehow discovered and mopped up.

We’ll have to wait and see if Madoff’s sons get off as lightly as their mother – they’ve had some actual lawsuits filed against them for a start, and were employees of their father. They did call the FBI though when their pops tearfully confessed that everything was a sham; depending on your love of conspiracy theories, you could surmise that Bernie orchestrated his demise thus so as to make his sons appear innocent. Or, y’know, they could just be innocent. Let’s let the Feds decide.

It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, considering lawsuits have been brought against other people close to Madoff, like Ezra Merkin, as well as other channellers of people’s money, like Fairfield Greenwich. But none get as close as Cohmad, who operated in the next office to Madoff and was partly owned by him. Maurice and Marcia Cohn, the father and daughter team who ran the company, were either very stupid, or very willing to look the other way. Robert Jaffe, who ran Cohmad’s Boston operation, has had the writing on the wall for some time – you may remember he was almost lynched by a gang of irate Floridian Jews just after the Madoff story broke, and had to be rescued by Donald Trump.

Also getting a civil suit filed against them is Stanley Chais, who looks like Magnum PI leading Friday prayers – he’s another guy who fed funds of others into Madoff’s coffers, bagging $546m in profits and $270m in fees. Like the Cohn’s, he’s either thick or involved – Madoff didn’t report a single loss during thousands of stock trades using Chais’s investments, of which Chais either thought “Wow, what a clever man!” or “I don’t care, just as long as I’m getting paid”. While Chais’s attorney said that he lost “virtually everything” to Madoff, the SEC claim that the whole thing was profitable for him. Chais’s clients include Eric Roth, who wrote films like Ali, Forrest Gump and, er, The Postman. Did someone say “karma”?

Give it some time, but we can expect criminal proceedings to be brought against some of these folks at some point. The feds are currently leaning on Frank DiPascali, Madoff’s “ninja” deputy, to extract names and information about the operation, before swinging in and rounding everyone up. Piecing together the evidence is turning into a massive ballache, what with some of the records needing to be digitised from microfilm. Madoff’s propensity for filing non-electronic records can’t be helping either.

Meanwhile the Madoff sentencing season is beginning in earnest – check this pretty-hard-to-stomach interview by Fox News with Claudine de la Villehuchet, widow of Rene, who killed himself after realising he’d lost millions of dollars of others people’s money by investing it with Madoff. She describes Madoff as a “psychopath” and a “murderer”. Those who enjoy nauseating invasions of people’s emotional privacy by interviewers acting like cut-price psychotherapists will find much to like.

Fairfield Greenwich was a fund-of-funds business, or “feeder fund”, which means that they invested clients’ money across a range of different funds; they acted as a medium between investors and individual hedge funds, feeding money to those funds, and taking a commission for doing so. If you plot a line of “honest hard work”, with doctor, fireman, aid worker etc at one end, then feeder-fund manager is about as far down the other end as you can get.

Unfortunately for their investors, Fairfield Greenwich was investing their money with Madoff, who was giving Fairfield handsome rewards for providing him with the much needed capital to keep his Ponzi scheme paying out. Fairfield presumably didn’t care to investigate Madoff’s funds too deeply; the money was rolling in, and that’s what counted. Their website describes one range of investments as being ”selected and managed with the same level of care and professionalism as all FGG products”, which sounds a little hollow now. About half of its $14bn-worth of assets under management were in Madoff funds.

Regulators from the state of Massachusetts, where Fairfield Greenwich is based, weren’t impressed with them for channelling so much money to Madoff, and accused them of fraud, citing a lack of “fiduciary responsibility to their clients”. Fairfield responded: “Nothing more than 20-20 hindsight that supposes that anyone familiar with Madoff’s operations should have determined that it was a Ponzi scheme”, later saying “The complaint here was rushed into existence and is so filled with errors and factual distortions as to completely misstate the conduct of the companies that make up the Fairfield Greenwich Group”. There are also various other lawsuits being made against the group from individual investors, and last week they also contested a range of statements made about them in a TV documentary about the Madoff case.

To be fair, they’re on pretty strong ground. If the America’s financial services regulators the SEC didn’t notice, then maybe they had no reason to suspect anything; Madoff did pay out $3bn to Fairfield funds over 18 years. They’re also arguing that Madoff gave them false data about his investments. But Jeffrey Tucker, one of the firm’s founders, knew that Madoff’s accountancy firm was just one man, despite also saying that the accountants were responsible for hundreds of clients. Fairfield were too blinded by the returns – $100m a year in fees – to bother questioning curveballs like this too deeply.

The scandal dragged the Fairfield Greenwich brand into the mud, hence the sell-off. It’s an ignominious end for 78-year-old founder Walter Noel, whose identikit socialite family looks like the product of a eugenics program sponsored by Piz Buin. Noels daughters are regulars on the New York rich kid scene, and they sound like a delightful bunch – known as the “Aspirina sisters” because of the headaches they gave female classmates after constantly stealing their boyfriends, four of them slept with the same guy one after another, while one of them dated an Italian mafioso while still in her teens. They’ve also been banned from their country club. Read the whole story of the family, including their annoying yapping on tennis courts and “tone-deaf” socialising amid the breaking scandal, in this typically epic and stately Vanity Fair piece; and read a pre-scandal VF piece on them here. The other founder, Jeffrey Tucker, is also hurting from the scandal – he and Noel have had to sell their private jet, and he’s had to sell off his horse farm.

While we hope the rumours that Noel has Alzheimer’s are false, this is a company that we’re not sad to see the back of. Hopefully feeder funds, with their extra level of opacity, will become a thing of the past in the wake of the Madoff scandal and the financial crisis in general.

Bummer for France Telecom, who own the Orange brand in France, and who spent loads of money bidding for and marketing the iPhone only to have its rivals sneak up in its slipstream. But really, this story isn’t about competition law generally – it’s about the specific and potentially crippling popularity of the iPhone. You didn’t see a lawsuit about the Orange-exclusive Levis 3G phone, because it was rubbish and no-one cared about it; having sole rights to the iPhone on the other hand is like having the keys to the royal mint, and has been deemed a position so powerful that it can seriously damage your rivals. Bouygues filed the complaint not after Orange’s bid succeeded, but after the iPhone sold 600,000 units in a year in France.

Will the case set a precedent for this kind of litigation? Will T-Mobile, with its exclusive rights to the G1, realise that it’s got the raw deal in the smartphone market? In the States, the fourth quarter of last year saw 621,000 new customers join T-Mobile, whereas AT&T, the exclusive provider of the iPhone in America, saw 2.1m new customers, of which 1.9m were iPhone subscribers.

Back in 2007, Apple received a few lawsuits from iPhone users forced to go with AT&T, who were unable to use their current network but reeeeally wanted an iPhone. There then followed last year some more lawsuits from people saying that AT&T’s network wasn’t strong enough to hold all the 3G-draining iPhone users, and that outages of the network meant that Apple and AT&T were breaking the terms of the contract. These piddling personal beefs were never heard of again, but maybe this France Telecom thing will make Verizon, T-Mobile et al think again.

Then again, it could just be a one-off. Germany didn’t see anything wrong with T-Mobile having exclusive rights to the iPhone back in 2007, throwing out a lawsuit from Vodafone very similar to the one made by Bouygues. Meanwhile AT&T is set to extend their exclusivity to 2010, and Apple is planning to get people to ditch their iPods and trade up to iPhones, and still make pots of cash in the process. The march continues.