Madoff trustee and law firm submit $22.1 mln bill

NEW YORK Nov 23 (Reuters) - Bernard Madoff's bankruptcy trustee and the law firm employing him submitted a $22.1 million legal bill covering five months of work.

Baker & Hostetler LLP is seeking $21.28 million of fees as counsel to court-appointed trustee Irving Picard for the five months ended Sept. 30, 2009, according to a filing on Monday with the U.S. bankruptcy court in Manhattan.

Picard, a partner at Baker & Hostetler, is separately seeking $835,605 for the same period as trustee for the Securities Investor Protection Corp, the federally chartered agency that supervises brokerage liquidations.

Several other firms are seeking more than $2.6 million of fees for work over various periods, the filing shows.

Picard is supervising the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, home to Madoff's estimated $65 billion Ponzi scheme.

He is responsible for determining which Madoff investors have valid claims and which benefited unwittingly from the fraud.

Picard is trying to recover assets to repay victims, including through auctions of Madoff's personal effects. Last month, he said he had recovered $1.4 billion of assets, just 7 percent of the $21.2 billion of investor losses he had found.

According to Monday's filing, nearly all of the fee applicants accepted a 10 percent discount from their normal billing rates and most, including Picard and his law firm, agreed to defer some fees.

A court hearing on the fee requests is scheduled for Dec. 17. Objections are due by Dec. 14.

The case is In re: Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 08-1789. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel; editing by John Wallace) ((jon.stempel@thomsonreuters.com +1 646 223 6317; Reuters Messaging: jon.stempel.reuters.com@reuters.net))