Elizabeth Warren demands Barclays investigation over former CEO’s Epstein links
Elizabeth Warren, a leading US senator, has called for an urgent investigation by Barclays bank into the former boss’s ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The most senior member of the US Senate Banking Committee wrote that it was "deeply unclear how Barclays, supposedly investigating Mr Staley’s connection to Epstein, failed to uncover this decades-long relationship".
A letter, seen by the Guardian, gave the bank two weeks to answer a series of probing questions about how they handled information on the links between its former chief executive Jess Staley and the paedophile financier.
The questions included whether the bank conducted any reviews into “deficiencies” in its executive hiring process, which had “allowed the board to hire a CEO who held extensive professional and personal ties to a convicted sex offender”.
Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting a trial on sex trafficking charges.
Mr Staley originally met Epstein in 2000 after he became head of JP Morgan’s private bank, where the sex offender was a client.
He later took over as chief executive of Barclays in 2015, but was made to step down in 2021, after regulators launched an investigation into the nature of the relationship between the two men.
Mr Staley was then banned from taking any job in the UK’s financial sector for playing down those ties.
US lawmakers raised concerns after a UK court hearing last year, where Mr Staley unsuccessfully tried to overturn the regulator’s decision to ban him from the British banking industry - four years after he was forced to step down as boss of Barclays.
Current Barclays chair Nigel Higgins reportedly did not ask Stanley about his last contact with Epstein, before he told the Financial Conduct Authority the last contact between the pair had been "well before" the CEO joined the bank.
“It appears that neither you nor any other member of the board conducted any deeper due diligence to verify Staley’s claims and simply took him at his word,” the letter said, referring to exchanges between the executive and board members during Staley’s tenure.
“It is unclear what specific actions, if any, Barclays took to investigate Staley and Epstein’s personal ties.”
The US lawmakers said this episode sparked questions about how the bank was managed.
“Barclays’s apparent failure to meaningfully investigate or address Staley’s relationship with Epstein raises significant governance questions regarding the bank’s ability to hold senior executives accountable for wrongdoing,” the letter said.
They added it was a "privilege" to hold local banking licenses and operate in the US - where Barclays holds $200bn (£150bn) in assets.
That privilege “is contingent on the ongoing character and fitness of management and the ability of the firm to conduct its operations in a safe and sound manner”.
Mr Staley is due to be grilled in a closed-door hearing by the House Oversight Committee, on which the letter’s co-signatories, Ro Khanna and Raja Krishnamoorthi, both sit.
A spokesperson for Barclays said: “The UK regulator concluded that Barclays was misled by Jes Staley. We conducted an investigation based on the information that was available to us at the time.
“Since then, new information has emerged that was not available to Barclays that demonstrates Mr Staley misled Barclays and many others as to the nature of the relationship with Epstein. That information relates to activities that predated his employment at Barclays.”
Lawyers who represented Jes Staley have been contacted by LBC for comment.
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