The legal professional common of the U.S. Virgin Islands filed a lawsuit this week in opposition to JP Morgan Chase, alleging that the banking large benefited from Jeffrey Epstein’s illegal sex trafficking enterprise and helped conceal the continuing exploitation of women and girls at his property on Little St. James.
The go well with, filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court docket, accuses JP Morgan of offering banking companies to Epstein even after he turned a registered intercourse offender within the U.S. Virgin Islands following his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Palm Seaside, Florida. It additionally accuses the monetary establishment of failing to adjust to federal rules, together with data and reporting necessities which will have flagged Epstein’s crimes to U.S. officers earlier than they ultimately got here to mild, in a deliberate try to cover Epstein’s suspicious actions.
“Monetary establishments can join — or choke — human trafficking networks, and enforcement actions filed and injunctive aid obtained by attorneys common are important to make sure that enterprises like Epstein’s can’t flourish sooner or later,” the legal professional common wrote in Tuesday’s grievance.
Epstein, a former financier and the long-time companion of British ex-socialite and convicted legal Ghislaine Maxwell, died by apparent suicide in August 2019 in his jail cell at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Heart, the place he was being held with out bail whereas awaiting trial on federal intercourse trafficking and conspiracy prices.
Epstein allegedly recruited, groomed and sexually abused dozens of women and underaged girls over the course of a long time and at a number of properties that he owned throughout the globe, in line with a grand jury’s indictment. Maxwell was convicted last year of a number of intercourse trafficking prices connected to Epstein and his crimes, together with intercourse trafficking a minor and transporting a minor for functions associated to legal sexual exercise. She was sentenced this previous summer season to twenty years in federal jail.
Denise N. George, the legal professional common for the U.S. Virgin Islands, initially introduced a lawsuit in opposition to Epstein’s property on Little St. James, one in all two non-public islands that he owned throughout the territory, and its two co-executors. George introduced in early December that the co-executors had agreed to pay $105 million in money together with half of the proceeds from the sale of Little St. James to the U.S. Virgin Islands for allegedly violating the islands’ legal guidelines prohibiting corruption, intercourse trafficking and sexual servitude.
Picture by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan by way of Getty Photographs
Within the new lawsuit, George alleges that JP Morgan willingly “turned a blind eye to proof of human trafficking for greater than a decade due to Epstein’s personal monetary footprint,” and since he constantly introduced worthwhile enterprise offers and clientele to the financial institution.
A authorities investigation into intercourse trafficking operations at Epstein’s property on the non-public island — which he owned from 1998 till his loss of life, and the place victims have mentioned in varied testimonies that lots of his crimes occurred — uncovered proof that JP Morgan “knowingly, negligently, and unlawfully supplied and pulled the levers by which recruiters and victims have been paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise,” the lawsuit alleges.
“JP Morgan facilitated and hid wire and money transactions that raised suspicion of — and have been in reality a part of — a legal enterprise whose forex was the sexual servitude of dozens of girls and ladies in and past the Virgin Islands,” the grievance continues. “Human trafficking was the principal enterprise of the accounts Epstein maintained at JP Morgan.”
It goes on to allege that the financial institution “facilitated, sustained, and hid the human trafficking community operated by Jeffrey Epstein from his dwelling and base within the Virgin Islands, and financially benefitted from this participation, immediately or not directly, by failing to adjust to federal banking rules.”
The most recent grievance arrived about one month after two of Epstein’s accusers sued each JP Morgan and Deutsche Financial institution for allegedly making thousands and thousands of {dollars} in income off of their relationships with him and his legal enterprise.
JP Morgan has not but publicly acknowledged the Virgin Islands’ federal lawsuit. CBS Information contacted the financial institution for remark however didn’t obtain a right away reply.
