the american bank JPMorgan Chase will pay $290 million to alleged victims of the late financier Jeffrey Epsteinaccused of sexual exploitation of minors, after an agreement announced on Monday that avoids him a high-impact media trial.
The sum, initially reported by the Wall Street Journal, was confirmed to AFP by one of the victims’ lawyers, David Boies.
“The parties believe this settlement is best for everyone, particularly the victims who survived Mr. Epstein’s horrific abuse.”said a joint statement.
The class action lawsuit, launched in 2022 by a woman whose identity has not been released, accused JPMorgan Chase of having facilitated the actions of Jeffrey Epstein by allowing him to finance his activities. The accusations were denied by the bank.
Jeffrey Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in prison in 2008 for bringing teenagers into prostitution with people in his circle in Florida (southeast United States), according to a secret agreement with a local prosecutor that allowed him to escape prosecution at the national level. federal.
Accused and arrested in 2019 for having organized, for several years, a network made up of dozens of young people under his influence and with whom he had sexual relations on his numerous properties, he committed suicide in prison a few weeks later, before being tried.
“historic agreements”
The financial agreement announced this Monday comes after a first successful negotiation, in mid-May, with the German Bank Deutsche Bank.
It was then announced that Deutsche Bank was to pay $75 million to settle a lawsuit in which it was accused of profiting by supporting the late mogul’s sex-trafficking scheme.
The defenders of the victims claimed that the German institution had allowed the alleged sexual predator to remain active thanks to the financial services it had provided since 2013.
That settlement involved an unidentified defendant following a class action lawsuit filed in November 2022 by an unidentified woman, apparently the same woman in the JPMorgan case.
“These agreements are historic and will change the lives of the survivors”said Sigrid McCawley, one of the alleged victim’s lawyers.
“Money that, for far too long, flowed between Jeffrey Epstein’s prostitution ring and major Wall Street banks is now being put to good use”. According to McCawley, these decisions “point out that financial institutions have an important role to play in identifying and stopping sex trafficking.”
intricate plot
This friendly resolution saves the bank from a civil lawsuit that probably would have occupied a good space in the media scene and could have associated, rightly or wrongly, the image of JPMorgan Chase with that of Jeffrey Epstein.
The announcement was made on the day of federal judge Jed Rakoff’s ruling, which allowed the lawsuit to be classified as a class action, meaning it would have been open to all alleged victims of abuse committed by Jeffrey Epstein.
The case had even reached the emblematic CEO of the bank, Jamie Dimon, who had to appear at length in May as a witness, although he is not directly involved in the file.
The alleged victim’s lawyers had requested that the senior executive give testimony again. A former JPMorgan Chase executive, James “Jesh” Staley, is at the center of the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he was a friend.
The man, who served as head of the group’s private banking activities (a body aimed at wealthy and institutional clients), left the bank in 2013 and claimed that he had mentioned the Jeffrey Epstein case to Jamie Dimon, but the latter has denied it. . JPMorgan Chase sued him in civil court.
“Any association with him (Epstein) was a mistake and we are sorry,” stressed the JPMorgan bank in a statement sent to AFP. “We never would have continued our relationship with him if we thought he was using our bank to facilitate heinous crimes.”
JPMorgan is also the subject of a legal action by the government of the United States Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, which also accuses it of having provided banking services to Epstein that allowed him to sustain his prostitution ring.
Source: AFP
Source: Gestion
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