JPMorgan reimbursed Jes Staley for trips to meet Jeffrey Epstein, filings allege

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JPMorgan Chase reimbursed former executive Jes Staley for trips he took to meet Jeffrey Epstein, according to allegations in New York court filings that shed further light on the US banking giant’s entanglements with the late sex offender. 

Staley, who is accused of witnessing and participating in Epstein’s sex crimes, also testified under oath that he told JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon about the financier’s misdeeds in 2006, the filings said.

Dimon has denied “knowing anything” about Epstein or his bank account until 2019. JPMorgan has sued Staley, claiming he misled the bank by internally vouching for the late sex offender.

JPMorgan last month agreed a $290mn settlement with Epstein accusers over its dealings with the disgraced financier. It still faces a separate lawsuit from the US Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a home, with a trial currently scheduled for October.

Staley, who went on to become the chief executive of Barclays, was for a period Epstein’s private banker, and made several visits to his homes in Manhattan, Florida and the island of Little Saint James.

In documents filed by the USVI on Monday, the territory said: “Staley submitted, and JPMorgan reimbursed, the costs associated with expense reports reflecting purported meetings with Epstein.” It separately claimed Staley and Epstein met in many of Epstein’s properties.

The filings laid out the territory’s most detailed account so far of JPMorgan’s dealings with Epstein until it let him go as a client in 2013, alleging that the bank maintained accounts for his victims and allowed him to withdraw $5mn in cash and send $3mn to women and girls over a decade.

They cite communications among JPMorgan staff that reference an account opened as “a favour” to Epstein for one of his alleged victims in 2004, without JPMorgan having verified details such as the woman’s date of birth or meeting her in person.

The bank’s employees justified the account opening by stating that “Jeffrey Epstein knows the model personally” and “Jeffrey Epstein often provides support to emerging models”, according to messages cited in the filings.

An account and credit card was opened by the bank for a woman brought to the US in her teens and described in news reports as Epstein’s “Yugoslavian sex slave”. The bank allegedly processed payments totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the woman, even after she was identified in media reports as a victim of sex trafficking. 

JPMorgan, which has expressed regret for banking Epstein but not admitted any liability, did not comment on the latest filings. In its own filing to the court on Monday, it accused the USVI of enabling Epstein’s crimes and promised to thoroughly refute the territory’s claims at trial.

“Rather than account for its own failures to investigate and monitor this criminal under its jurisdiction . . . USVI blames a third-party bank that did not have USVI’s authority to enforce any law, nor USVI’s knowledge of Epstein’s crimes in USVI’s territory,” the bank said.

Epstein was arrested in Florida in 2006 for soliciting a minor for prostitution, a fact known to various JPMorgan staff. By that point, the lender “banked all the girls and women publicly alleged . . . to be recruiters, accomplices, or victims” of the financier, the USVI’s filings allege, including Ghislaine Maxwell, to whom the bank transferred over $25mn in total.

Maxwell, a former associate of Epstein, was convicted last year of aiding his abuse and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In a meeting soon after Epstein’s 2006 arrest, JPMorgan’s compliance team acknowledged that he was “known to pay cash for his massages” and that “minors are the issue”, the filings said.

“JPMorgan had virtually every financial detail of Epstein’s venture — from payments to young women in Lithuania and Russia, to transfers for the purchase of a helicopter by Maxwell, to a ‘revoked’ credit card for an alleged recruiter who talked to the police — in real-time and kept virtually all of it, and thus its own outsized role, under wraps until Epstein was dead and gone,” the USVI said in its filing.

The USVI alleged Epstein’s conduct was widely discussed, and at times joked about, inside JPMorgan. One bank executive in an email cited by the USVI compared another client’s house with Epstein’s “except it was more tasteful, and fewer nymphettes”.

The USVI said Epstein was a major client at JPMorgan — allegedly the biggest revenue generator at the private bank in 2003 — and referred a roster of other wealthy individuals to JPMorgan. These allegedly included Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Google itself.

The relationship with Brin was worth upwards of $4bn to JPMorgan in 2014, the filings alleged, making him one of the private bank’s most important clients. Representatives for Brin and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The nature of Staley’s relationship with Epstein and his trips to the financier’s private island in the USVI have attracted considerable scrutiny following the release of emails by Staley from his JPMorgan account where he described being “in the hot tub with a glass of white wine”. Staley has strongly denied involvement in Epstein’s sex crimes.

Epstein died in 2019 in New York while awaiting trial on federal charges of sex trafficking. His death was ruled a suicide.