In the 1990s, the Belfer family held over $2bn worth of equity in energy company Enron, making them one of the business’s largest investors.
Belfer, who sat on the Enron board at the time of the collapse, maintained that he knew nothing about the illegal accounting practices that led to the company’s demise.
Enron declared bankruptcy in 2001 after executives hid huge losses from shareholders using fraudulent accounting. Enron employees and investors lost the vast majority of their money and pensions in the collapse, which at the time was the largest business liquidation in US history.
After the Enron debacle, the Belfers are believed to have pulled over $28m out of the Madoff investment scheme before it collapsed, and were named in a lawsuit by administrators who tried to recover money in the wake of the scandal.
Robert Belfer is the son of oil mogul Arthur Belfer, who fled Poland in the wake of the Nazi invasion, and founded a business in New York selling sleeping bags to the U.S. Army before expanding into oil and oil products in the 1950s.
The younger Belfer tycoon, who was born in 1935 in a religious home in Krakow, was interviewed by the United States Holocaust Museum in 2006 about his childhood before coming to the United States.
He told the museum of his childhood in a Jewish town he likened to the fictional town of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof, with "Yiddish being spoken in public."
The Belfers have declined to comment publicly.
