by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
The tenure of Jamie Dimon as Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest federally-insured bank in the United States and the largest trading casino on Wall Street, has copiously revealed the following: the bank is more than willing to look the other way at crime if it means an increase in assets, profits or business referrals.
Each of those three ingredients were present in the bank’s decades long involvement with Bernie Madoff, with its Chinese Princeling scandal and in the unfolding details of its intimate relationship with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
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This reality may be difficult for the New York business press to acknowledge – since it has mostly covered Jamie Dimon as the grand statesman of Wall Street – but this is the hard reality nonetheless.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal’s Khadeeja Safdar and David Benoit revealed the contents of a 22-page internal report that JPMorgan Chase had prepared in 2019 as a timeline of its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The bank was apparently attempting to assess its liability after Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019 by the Justice Department and charged with sex trafficking. (Epstein was found dead in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. The Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.)
The 22-page internal report had been filed under seal with the federal district court in Manhattan that is hearing two lawsuits against the bank for aiding and abetting Epstein’s sex trafficking. Apparently, someone leaked the full contents of the report to the reporters. One paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article is particularly enlightening. It reads as follows:
“The 2019 JPMorgan report said that Epstein had appeared to have forged close relationships with senior executives and government officials, including Dubai’s Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem and British politician Peter Mandelson. Epstein tried to connect these associates to Staley and the bank for business deals and international expansions.”
The reference to “Staley” is to Jes Staley, a former executive of the bank who worked a few hundred feet from Dimon’s office, according to a deposition given by Dimon. Disturbing internal emails show that Staley was closely aligned with Epstein, even visiting him while he was serving his sentence for sex with a minor. Now consider the above paragraph in combination with what Virginia Giuffre has alleged in her prior lawsuits against Epstein: that, beginning when she was just 17 years old, Epstein and his girlfriend/procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, arranged sexual encounters for Giuffre with royalty and powerful politicians. Prince Andrew settled monetary damages with Giuffre last year.
To put it simply, Epstein was an asset gatherer, and profit gatherer, and new business gatherer for JPMorgan Chase. And he dangled sex with underage women as an inducement to get meetings and make connections. And that is why, despite Epstein’s conviction in 2008 for procuring sex with a minor, despite his forced registration as a life-long sex offender, and despite his settling of dozens of cases of sexual assault of minors, JPMorgan Chase retained him as a client from 1998 to 2013.
There is a serious and deeply disturbing pattern of looking the other way at crime in order to gain a business advantage at JPMorgan Chase under Jamie Dimon’s “stewardship.”
In November 2016, units of JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay more than $264 million to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve in what was widely known as its Chinese “Princeling” scandal.
In announcing the settlement in the Princeling scandal in 2016, officials at the Justice Department said this:
“The so-called Sons and Daughters Program was nothing more than bribery by another name…Awarding prestigious employment opportunities to unqualified individuals in order to influence government officials is corruption, plain and simple. This case demonstrates the Criminal Division’s commitment to uncovering corruption no matter the form of the scheme…
“In this case, JPMorgan employees designed a program to hire otherwise unqualified candidates for prestigious investment banking jobs solely because these candidates were referred to the bank by officials in positions to award business to the bank. In certain instances, referred candidates were hired with the understanding that the hiring was linked to the award of specific business. This is no longer business as usual; it is corruption.”
In January 2014, JPMorgan Chase paid $2.6 billion in fines and restitution, signed a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, and walked away from their 22-year involvement with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.
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