The Financial Post reports in its Friday edition that the U.S. Justice Department has started a long-delayed distribution to victims of Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme, tapping a $4-billion fund created through settlements with some of the con man's oldest customers and his bank, JPMorgan (all figures U.S.). A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says that the Madoff Victim Fund will return $772.5-million to more than 24,000 victims worldwide, the first in a series of distributions. The payouts will eventually become the largest of forfeited funds in the history of the Justice Department's victim-compensation program. Almost nine years after Madoff's arrest, investors are still trying to recover money from a fraud which erased $17.5-billion in principal and more than $40-billion in fake profits that victims believed was held in their accounts. Some have recovered more than $10-billion from another fund overseen in bankruptcy court through a separate process. The administrator of the fund, Richard Breeden, said in June that the Justice Department had approved more than 35,000 petitions claiming total losses of more than $6.5-billion. JPMorgan was accused of turning a blind eye to the scam.