Staley faces Epstein sex trafficking claims
FORMER Barclays boss Jes Staley faces new claims about his relationship with disgraced Jeffrey Epstein – including a suggestion that he ‘may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation’.
The claim was contained in court papers filed in New York by the US Virgin Islands, which is suing Staley’s former employer JP Morgan for allegedly turning a ‘blind eye’ to Epstein’s crimes.
Epstein, who died in 2019, was a client of Staley when he worked for JP Morgan.
Staley, 66, became chief executive of Barclays in 2015 but quit in November 2021 after a preliminary probe by City regulators into his relationship with Epstein.
The banker is accused of regularly visiting Epstein in the US Virgin Islands and corresponding with him while he was behind bars, according to the papers. Parts of the documents from the ongoing case are blacked out but some were unredacted this week.
‘Between 2008 and 2012, Staley exchanged approximately 1,200 emails with Epstein from his JP Morgan email account,’ the papers say. ‘These communications show a close personal relationship and “profound” friendship between the two men and even suggest that Staley may have been involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.
‘Staley corresponded with Epstein while Epstein was incarcerated and visited Epstein’s Virgin Islands residence.’
The claim also states that ‘human trafficking was the principal business of the accounts Epstein maintained at JP Morgan’. It said the bank did business with Epstein from 1998 to 2013 and serviced about 55 accounts related to the financier, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The papers said none of the emails between Epstein and Mr Staley ‘were flagged in connection with risk reviews of Epstein’s accounts’ and that JP Morgan ‘even asked Staley to discuss the human trafficking allegations with Epstein’.
The bank was said to have ‘ignored numerous red flags’. The accounts were used to pay women and related companies, among them ‘numerous women with eastern European surnames who were publicly and internally identified as Epstein recruiters and/or victims’, the documents said.
One woman paid more than £490,000 by Epstein had ‘according to news reports contained in JP Morgan’s due diligence reports’ been ‘purchased’ by him at the age of 14, the papers stated.
In July 2013, after Staley had left JP Morgan, the US bank’s compliance officer terminated its relationship with Epstein.
Staley’s lawyer declined to comment, but a lawyer representing him has previously said: ‘We wish to make it expressly clear that our client had no involvement in any of the alleged crimes committed by Epstein.’ JP Morgan declined to comment. Epstein was found dead in 2019 in his jail cell in Manhattan aged 66 in what was ruled a suicide, while awaiting trial on charges of sexual abuse of minors and sex trafficking.
Last June, his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, 61, was sentenced to 20 years for trafficking minors for sex.