by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall St On Parade:
On Tuesday, the Financial Times broke the story that JPMorgan Chase and HSBC had been named in a new report by the U.S.-based think tank, the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), for their role in laundering payments for the notorious mercenary group, Wagner, that has supported Russian military operations in Ukraine, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The think tank wrote that the involvement of the banks with Wagner had been done “unwittingly.”
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That’s also how JPMorgan Chase explained its money laundering for Ponzi kingpin Bernie Madoff for decades and for the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, for at least 15 years.
Curiously, neither the Wall Street Journal nor the New York Times found the information in the think tank’s report worthy of sharing with their readers. Wall Street On Parade, on the other hand, finds it highly relevant to report to our readers that the largest bank in the United States, with a storied history of laundering money for unsavory characters over long stretches of time, has now been linked to Wagner, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury and designated as a Russian proxy and Transnational Criminal Organization. The U.S. Treasury wrote this about Wagner last January:
“PMC Wagner (Wagner Group) is a Russian private military company led by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Putin crony and the target of multiple U.S. sanctions. Wagner Group has been involved in Kremlin-backed combat operations around the world in support of Putin’s war on Ukraine. As Russia’s military has struggled on the battlefield, Putin has resorted to relying on the Wagner Group to continue his war of choice. The Wagner Group has also meddled and destabilized countries in Africa, committing widespread human rights abuses and extorting natural resources from their people. Today, the Wagner Group is being redesignated pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13581, as amended by E.O. 13863, for being a foreign person that constitutes a significant transnational criminal organization. Wagner personnel have engaged in an ongoing pattern of serious criminal activity, including mass executions, rape, child abductions, and physical abuse in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Mali.”
Prigozhin died in a plane crash on August 23, 2023. The private jet was carrying him and his top lieutenants. All 10 people on board the jet were killed in the crash, which came just two months after Prigozhin had staged a failed Wagner mutiny against Russian military leadership.
The think tank revelations come one year after JPMorgan Chase settled two federal lawsuits for a combined $365 million which alleged that the bank had laundered money for the international sex trafficker of children, Jeffrey Epstein, from at least 1998 to 2013.
One of the lawsuits had been brought by Epstein’s sex assault victims. JPMorgan Chase settled that case for $290 million after the plaintiffs’ lawyers agreed to dubious terms.
The second lawsuit was brought by the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein had owned a private island compound. JPMorgan Chase was able to settle that case for just $75 million after launching a scorched-earth public relations campaign that focused on politicians in the U.S. Virgin Islands’ unsavory ties to Epstein themselves.
Lawyers for the bank seemed particularly angry at just how much internal bank information the Attorney General for the U.S. Virgin Islands chose to share with the American people. In one court filing, the Attorney General wrote this:
“Even if participation requires active engagement…there is no genuine dispute that JPMorgan actively participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture from 2006 until 2019. The Court found allegations that the Bank allowed Epstein to use its accounts to send dozens of payments to then-known co-conspirators [redacted] provided excessive and unusual amounts of cash to Epstein; and structured cash withdrawals so that those withdrawals would not appear suspicious ‘went well beyond merely providing their usual [banking] services to Jeffrey Epstein and his affiliated entities’ and were sufficient to allege active engagement.”
The U.S. Virgin Islands had previously alerted the court to the unfathomable sums of hard cash that Epstein was able to take from the accounts he maintained at JPMorgan Chase without the bank filing the legally mandated Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to law enforcement. In one court filing, it tallied up the giant piles of cash, writing as follows:
“Between September 2003 and November 2013, or approximately ten years, JPMorgan handled more than $5 million in outgoing cash transactions for Epstein — ignoring its own policy discouraging large cash withdrawals….”
The U.S. Virgin Islands’ attorneys cited to internal emails at JPMorgan Chase showing that employees at the bank were aware of Epstein’s “[c]ash withdrawals … made in amounts for $40,000 to $80,000 several times a month” while also being aware that Epstein paid his underage sexual assault victims in cash.
Epstein was found dead in his New York City jail cell on August 10, 2019 while awaiting trial. The Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide.
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 its long-tenured Chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon. The bank has admitted to an unprecedented five criminal felony counts brought against it by the U.S. Department of Justice since 2014. Two of those felony counts were for money laundering for Ponzi mastermind Bernie Madoff.
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.
The Justice Department prosecutors who settled the case against JPMorgan Chase used much of the investigative material from Irving Picard, the Trustee of the Madoff victims’ fund, to bring their charges against JPMorgan Chase. According to Picard, JPMorgan Chase used unaudited financial statements from Madoff and skipped the required steps of bank due diligence to make $145 million in loans to Madoff’s business.
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