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Irving Picard, the lawyer recovering money for the victims of Madoff's decades-long multibillion dollar fraud, sued Kohn and the bank she founded, Bank Medici, as well as Italy's UniCredit and its unit, Bank Austria, and 53 other defendants.

The complaint in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York said the litigation seeks to recover $19.6 billion in damages. Since Madoff's arrest two years ago, Kohn has not traveled to New York, where she first met Madoff in 1985 and they became business partners, the 161-page complaint said.

Separate lawyers representing Kohn and Bank Medici, now known as 2020 Medici, were not available to comment.

Picard's complaint said that Kohn's denial to Austrian authorities that she was close to Madoff, was false.

"In Sonja Kohn, Madoff found a criminal soul mate, whose greed and dishonest inventiveness equaled his own," Picard said in a statement. Her husband, her mother and son and daughter were also named as defendants in the lawsuit.

Some of them invoked their Fifth Amendment Rights to remain silent hundreds of times when they were deposed by the trustee, the court document said.

It said even after Madoff's arrest, Kohn laundered hundreds of thousands of dollars through various sham entities. "This dissipation is ongoing," Picard claimed.

The liquidator of BLMIS has filed a blizzard of lawsuits in recent weeks to meet a mid-December legal deadline, the second anniversary of Madoff's arrest.

Madoff, 72, is serving a 150-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in March 2009 to orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme in which early investors were paid with the money of new clients and almost no actual trading took place.

"THE MEDICI ENTERPRISE"

The complaint dubbed Kohn's part "The Medici Enterprise" and a "deliberately Byzantine structure," and said elements had been "purposefully concealed" from the trustee, United States and other law enforcement authorities.

"We believe that even more information regarding the full scope of this criminal enterprise will be revealed," Picard said.

Separately on Friday, Picard said that his team of lawyers at Baker & Hostetler LLP had reached settlements totaling $80 million with an undisclosed number of charities and nonprofit organizations that withdrew more than they deposited in Madoff's firm.

Overall, about $2.6 billion has been recovered. The trustee and his lawyers have sued individual investors, hedge funds and banks for amounts totaling about $51 billion. They said on Friday that the estimate of the total lost in the Ponzi scheme is approximately $19.6 billion.