Deutsche Bank will pay $75 million to settle a lawsuit in which the German bank is accused of profiting by supporting the late mogul Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme.
As published by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the agreement involves an unidentified victim who launched a class action lawsuit in November 2022, arguing that the bank did business with Epstein knowing that he was using funds from the account to support his trading activity. sex trafficking.
The publication, citing people close to the case, said Deutsche Bank did not admit wrongdoing. A spokesman for the German bank declined to comment.
According to the original lawsuit filed in a New York court, Deutsche Bank benefited financially by supporting the “sex trafficking organization to coercively rape, assault, and sex traffick plaintiff Jane Doe 1 and numerous class members.”.
Epstein, an American financial magnate who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex crimes, began his relationship with Deutsche Bank in 2013 after JPMorgan Chase closed his accounts, the Wall Street Journal reported.
(Reuters)
In July 2020, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $150 million to settle claims brought by the New York Department of Financial Services over compliance failures related to the bank’s work for Epstein. “We acknowledge our mistake in hiring Epstein in 2013 and the weaknesses in our processes, and we have learned from our mistakes and shortcomings,” Deutsche Bank said in July 2020.
In another case, an unidentified woman, apparently the same one in the Deutsche Bank lawsuit, and the US Virgin Islands separately sued JPMorgan last year, accusing the bank of facilitating Epstein’s crimes by ignoring warnings and keep him as a customer until 2013.
According to court documents, the subpoenas in these cases have targeted multiple well-known individuals whom Epstein was possibly referring to JPMorgan for clients, including Elon Musk or Google co-founder Larry Page.
The bank has denied the allegations and filed its own lawsuit against a former executive for his ties to Epstein.
Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 of paying young girls for massages but served only 13 months in jail under a secret plea deal. He later faced charges of trafficking underage girls for sexual purposes and committed suicide in a New York jail in August 2019.
