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JPMorgan Chase & Co. said on Tuesday it had reached a settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands and Jess Staley in a legal dispute stemming from its dealings with Jeffrey Epstein’s human-trafficking operation.
The settlement is intended to draw a line under damaging lawsuits that revealed details of JPMorgan’s ties to late sex offenders and led to the death of the company’s Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon this year. He was questioned for several hours under oath.
The cases have also drawn close attention from former Barclays chief executive John Staley, who met Epstein when he was a senior private banker at JPMorgan Chase.
JPMorgan Chase said in a statement that it will pay $30 million to U.S. Virgin Islands anti-human trafficking charities, invest $25 million in U.S. Virgin Islands law enforcement agencies, and cover legal fees of $20 million. A trial in the case is scheduled to begin next month. Epstein had a residence in the U.S. Virgin Islands and the company has sought at least $190 million from banks.
JPMorgan Chase has strenuously denied any responsibility for Epstein’s crimes. “While the settlement does not involve an admission of liability, the company deeply regrets having any association with this individual and will never continue to do business with him if it believes he has used the bank in any way to commit heinous crimes,” it said . .
JPMorgan also said it had reached an agreement with Staley to resolve claims against him. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
The U.S. Virgin Islands said it had obtained a commitment from JPMorgan to “implement and maintain meaningful anti-trafficking measures” as part of the settlement.
U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Ariel Smith said the agreement “should be a wake-up call to Wall Street about banks’ responsibilities under the law to detect and prevent human trafficking.” “We are proud to have stood with the survivors throughout the litigation and this settlement reflects our continued commitment to them.”
Staley’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
JPMorgan Chase sued Staley in March, demanding that he cover any fines the bank must pay in proceedings related to Epstein. It also requires Staley to return more than $80 million in damages for allegedly failing to fully disclose the extent of his relationship with Epstein.
Staley has denied any wrongdoing and described JPMorgan’s allegations as “defamatory” and “baseless but serious.”
The USVI case is one of two lawsuits JPMorgan faces over its dealings with Epstein. Epstein was a client of JPMorgan Chase Private Bank from 1998 to 2013, when JPMorgan ended its relationship with Epstein. Epstein allegedly had hundreds of millions of dollars at JPMorgan Chase.
JPMorgan paid $290 million this year to settle a separate lawsuit filed on behalf of women who said they were abused by Epstein, and the bank was also accused of ignoring repeated warnings about Epstein’s sex crimes.
Dimon must give seven hours of testimony in response to the May lawsuit.
Public court documents in the cases describe how Epstein’s internal red flags were ignored for years and shed new light on his finances and dealings with powerful elites.
In 2008, Epstein was briefly jailed in Florida after pleading guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor. In 2019, he was charged by federal prosecutors with sex trafficking of minors and committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial.
The lawsuits also revealed new details about the relationship between Epstein and Staley. Staley resigned from Barclays in 2021 after seeing the preliminary conclusions of a British regulator’s investigation that examined whether he had mischaracterized his relationship with Epstein as purely professional. He worked at JPMorgan Chase for more than 30 years until leaving in 2013.
Court documents show the two exchanged 1,200 emails through Staley’s JPMorgan Chase account, which included unexplained references to female Disney characters and a reference to Staley “sipping a glass of white wine in a hot tub.” ” description.
After Epstein’s relationship with JPMorgan ended in 2013, he became a client of Deutsche Bank, which earlier this year paid $75 million to settle an unnamed Epstein accuser on behalf of dozens of women lawsuit filed.
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