An attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission has revealed her superiors shunned warnings about the jailed financier Bernie Madoff. Madoff was sentenced this week to 150 years in jail for running a massive Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of some $50 billion. The attorney, Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, says she told SEC officials in 2005 about irregularities that later proved to be elements of Madoff’s wide-scale fraud. Walker-Lightfoot says she was told to focus on other matters not concerning Madoff. One of Walker-Lightfoot’s supervisors was Eric Swanson, who later married Madoff’s niece. The key whistleblower in the Madoff case, Harry Markopolos, has also said the SEC ignored his warnings as far back as the year 2000.