BERNIE MADOFF’S accountant was last night arrested on charges of aiding and abetting the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

The move came as US authorities continue to tighten the net around the convicted fraudster’s family and business associates.

David Friehling, the sole practitioner of accountancy firm Friehling Horowitz, was charged with securities fraud, aiding and abetting investment adviser fraud and four counts of filing false audit reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Mr Friehling (49) faces up to 105 years in prison if found guilty and ordered to serve the maximum penalty for each charge. His lawyer, Andrew Lankler, declined to comment after the US Department of Justice revealed the arrest.

US prosecutors claim Mr Friehling failed to properly conduct audits of Madoff’s firm while submitting false audit and accounting documents that helped cover up the $65 billion (€4.5 billion) fraud for at least two decades.

The firm occupied a 550sq ft space in New City, a northern suburb of New York City, and served as auditor to Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities since 1991, prosecutors said.

“Although Mr Friehling is not charged with knowledge of the Madoff Ponzi scheme, he is charged with deceiving investors by falsely certifying that he audited the financial statements of Mr Madoff’s business,” said acting US Attorney Lev Dassin.

The SEC, America’s top financial regulator, brought separate civil charges against Mr Friehling and his firm in a bid to recoup millions of dollars worth of fees and other funds he is alleged to have received from Madoff, which were described as “ill-gotten gains”.

The SEC complaint alleged that Mr Friehling earned $186,000 a year in fees from Madoff’s fake investment firm, which the regulator is expected to seek to claw back.

The complaint also claimed that Mr Friehling and his family built up more than $14 million in Madoff investment accounts by the time the fraud was uncovered and that they had taken more than $5.5 million in profits from the fund in the past eight years.

Mr Friehling “sold his licence to Madoff for more than 17 years while Madoff’s Ponzi scheme went undetected,” said James Clarkson, acting director of the SEC’s office in New York. “For all those years, Friehling deceived investors and regulators by and declaring that Madoff’s enterprise had a clean audit record.”

Madoff (70) was jailed last week after pleading guilty to 11 criminal charges in a huge fraud that conned close to 5,000 investors out of billions of dollars. He is set to be sentenced to a term that could be 150 years at a hearing on June 16th.

In a separate Federal Court filing, prosecutors yesterday said they would seek to seize tens of millions of dollars of assets from Madoff’s wife Ruth, his sons Mark and Andrew, and key business associates.

Since Madoff’s guilty plea prosecutors have laid claim to at least $170 million worth of assets belonging to his family, including luxury properties in New York, Florida and France, luxury yachts, jewelry, cash and bonds.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that promises abnormally high returns to investors out of the money paid in by subsequent investors, rather than from cash generated by real business transactions.