A leading Democratic senator has written to the JP Morgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon to request clarification on the bank’s contact with the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the senate banking committee, wrote to the Wall Street grandee last week to ask if he took advice from Epstein while lobbying against a UK tax on banker bonuses, in a letter published by the US senate’s banking, housing and urban affairs committee.
“It is critical that Congress and the American public fully understand the extent of any interactions the bank and you had with Epstein,” the senator wrote.
Dimon, who has been chair and chief executive of the largest US bank for two decades, told a court in 2023 that he had never met Epstein and had not heard the late sex offender’s name until his 2019 arrest.
But a cache of documents released by the US Department of Justice this year has piled pressure on Dimon, one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street, and raised fresh questions about his links with Epstein.
A 2009 email emerged earlier this year as part of new disclosures of the Epstein files, appeared to show the disgraced financier asking former Labour minister Peter Mandelson if Dimon should lobby the UK’s then chancellor, Alistair Darling, in an attempt to dissuade him from introducing a proposed tax on banker bonuses.
Mandelson replied Dimon should “mildly threaten” the chancellor – and the banker is reported to have subsequently spoken to Darling and pointed out that JP Morgan was a big UK employer and purchaser of government bonds, and threatened to cancel investment in new London headquarters.
Mandelson was sacked as US ambassador last September because of revelations about his close friendship with Epstein.
“These resurfaced emails and related reporting raise serious questions regarding the extent of the bank’s relationship with Epstein, and your knowledge of these ties,” Warren said in her letter, which was first reported by the Financial Times.
Former JP Morgan executive and ex-Barclays chief executive, Jes Staley, has previously alleged that he communicated with Dimon about the bank’s relationship with Epstein. A spokesperson for JP Morgan said: “No such conversation ever occurred. Further, a UK tribunal has already called Staley’s testimony evasive and unreliable.”
The bank, which has sued Staley, claims he hid Epstein’s crimes from colleagues to keep him as a client.
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The parties were subsequently reported to have reached a confidential settlement.
A spokesperson for JP Morgan said: “Any association with the man was a mistake and we regret it, but we would not have continued doing business with him had we believed he was engaged in ongoing crimes. We exited him as a client in 2013 – years before his federal sex trafficking arrest and years after the government had damning information they kept from us.”
The US bank also reiterated that Dimon never met Epstein and “was not involved in any decisions about his account”, while he “regularly speaks his mind on bad, anti-growth policy and has his own views”.
Any suggestion that Dimon spoke with Epstein or took counsel from him was false, the spokesperson added.
