JPMorgan Chase executive Mary Callahan Erdoes sought advice for a $600 million tax issue from disgraced former financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2005, legal filings alleged.
Erdoes, a veteran JPMorgan executive who became head of the bank’s asset and wealth management division in 2009, “personally sought” help from Epstein to resolve the massive tax issue, according to court documents the U.S. Virgin islands filed overnight.
The request from Erdoes was on behalf of someone else, but that information was redacted in the filing.
“It was simply a request for an introduction and it was well before Epstein was arrested or officially accused of any crimes,” a JPMorgan spokeswoman said Tuesday in a statement.
The new allegations about the bank’s yearslong relationship with Epstein came as part of the U.S. territory’s lawsuit accusing JPMorgan of facilitating the notorious ex-money manager’s sex trafficking operation. Epstein killed himself in August 2019 while in jail in Manhattan on child sex trafficking charges.
The USVI in court filings Monday night asked the court for partial summary judgment in its favor. JPMorgan also filed a motion for partial summary judgment overnight.
The territory alleged that Epstein was a “personal resource” for Erdoes and her former boss at JPMorgan, Jes Staley, and that the two bankers decided to keep Epstein as a client for years after he was accused of paying to have underaged girls brought to his home. In a deposition this year, Erdoes acknowledged that JPMorgan was aware of the accusations against Epstein by 2006.
The bank took years to decide to cut Epstein off, only doing so in 2013. JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million to settle a lawsuit from Epstein’s victims, but the USVI suit has continued.
In 2008, after the Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme was uncovered, Erdoes allegedly asked Staley to reach out to Epstein “to get the scoop from down there,” according to USVI’s latest court filing.
On that, JPMorgan had this statement: “Jeffrey Epstein was in Florida where many of Madoff’s victims lived. If she had made any call at all, it would have been to reach out [to] Jes to see if Epstein had any more details about what was happening there.”
