For those who had accounts at PFG – the overriding questions beyond what happened, what has changed, and all the politics and drama surrounding those items – is when am I going to get more of my money back, and how much of my money will I be getting back?

We provided our estimates of possible recovery amounts given varying circumstances either going for or against customers here (PFGBest Update: Recovery Scenarios/Percentages), and covered what exciting news the CFTC Suing US Bank was for the possibility of recovery is beyond that (the full missing amount of $200 million is only about 1% of US Bank’s annual revenue).  But there remains a lot of confusion on what the time-frames are for all of this. To tackle that, we talked with the PFG Bankruptcy trustee Ira Bodenstein recently and have summarized the conversation below:

1. The main delay in processing further customer distributions at this point is the verification of all of the claims which have been submitted. There were over 3 times the number of claims expected with many people submitting multiple claim forms, and the trustee is now going through the process of verifying the amounts, objecting to duplicates, and objecting to claims which are invalid.  His goal is to have the claim reconciliation done and a second distribution made before the end of the year.

2.  The forex lawsuit (the trustee says the forex funds were not required to be segregated and thus should go to the benefit of futures customers, the forex customers have filed suit crying foul) should not hold up a second distribution, meaning a third distribution would likely be made upon the successful outcome – for futures customers – of the lawsuit. The lawsuit itself is progressing at a snail’s pace, with discovery to be completed by Sept. 30, 2013 and trial dates to be set around that time. We expect this suit to last through this time next year.

3.  The trustee has met with the CFTC to discuss how their lawsuit against US Bank impacts the actions of the trustee, and following the CFTC suit requested and received an extension of the stay (delay) of the class action lawsuit through August of 2014. Interpretation – the class action lawsuit likely won’t go anywhere until the CFTC has finished their suit, and the CFTC suit is at the very least more than a full year away from any sort of resolution.