Lily Mae Lazarus here, filling in for Alyson. Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and sex offender who died by suicide in prison in 2019, inflicted tremendous harm on the still-not-fully-tallied number of women he abused and trafficked to others. He also continues to create problems for the banks that served him as a client while he was engaging in those activities—not least for Deutsche Bank (No. 177 on the Fortune Global 500), where Epstein was a client from 2013 until not long before his death.
In the latest installment of our investigations into the 3 million Epstein-related files released by the Department of Justice, my reporting reveals that that relationship lasted longer than Deutsche Bank previously told regulators.
The bank claimed in a 2020 consent order with New York’s Department of Financial Services that it had severed ties with Epstein in December 2018, giving him til the end of February 2019 to get his money out of the bank. But internal emails reviewed by Fortune show that some of Epstein’s accounts were still open days after Epstein was arrested in July 2019—including one called the Butterfly Trust, which federal prosecutors showed was used to funnel nearly $3 million in payments to alleged co-conspirators and women with Eastern European surnames.
Over the course of 2019, Epstein’s banker at Deutsche Bank, Stewart Oldfield, was still arranging six-figure cash pickups and inviting Epstein’s personal trader to the Frieze art fair as the so-called offboarding dragged on. The evening of the arrest, Oldfield couldn’t even confirm which accounts were closed, internal documents show.
The gap between what Deutsche Bank told its regulator in the 2020 consent decree and what the documents show is where potential legal exposure begins, according to the lawyers Fortune spoke with. “Anytime you affirm something, you’re basically saying, I swear this is the truth,” white-collar criminal defense attorney Priya Chaudhry said. Under New York law, knowingly filing a false instrument with a public agency is a felony—and the Manhattan D.A., the New York A.G., and the Southern District of New York each retain jurisdiction. None has brought charges against Deutsche Bank tied to the Epstein relationship—yet. Read the full story.—Lily Mae Lazarus, reporter
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