NEW YORK (Reuters) - About $946 million has been recovered so far from the firm of accused swindler Bernard Madoff, the trustee overseeing the firm's liquidation said in court yesterday.

"It is our intention to designate those funds as customer property," the court-appointed trustee, Irving Picard, told US Bankruptcy Court Judge Burton Lifland in New York. "It is our intention to have all these funds, and funds from assets we are able to collect, to go into the customer fund and distribute to the victims."

The trustee is working for the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), a non-profit established by Congress in 1970 to maintain a reserve for swindled investors.

Madoff, a veteran investment manager, was arrested on December 11 and charged with securities fraud. Officials say he confessed to running a scheme with possible losses of up to $50 billion. He is under house arrest and 24-hour surveillance on a charge of masterminding the biggest fraud in Wall Street history.

The deadline for Madoff's customers to make a claim with the SIPC is July 2, Picard told the court.

At the close of business on Tuesday, $111.4 million in cash had been recovered from banks and other financial institutions where Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC had accounts, the trustee said.

He said a further $300 million in securities had been recovered, in addition to $535 million from banks that was announced last week. The Madoff firm had a brokerage arm and an investment arm.

SIPC was working closely with investigators from the FBI and federal prosecutors at the Madoff firm's Manhattan office and at a warehouse in the New York City borough of Queens where 7,000 unmarked boxes of the firm's documents were stored.

"We had 16 people go in just to do an inventory of the boxes," Picard, a lawyer, told reporters after the hearing. "Their job is not to study or analyse the records. That is down the road."

He said he hoped distribution of investors' money could start "in the near future" but said he could not be specific.