James Staley Fined and Barred From Finance Field in U.K. for Epstein Ties

The News

Britain’s money regulator on Thursday barred James E. Staley, the former chief govt of Barclays, from holding senior positions in the country’s money market for deceptive officials about his marriage with Jeffrey Epstein. The punishment, which also included a high-quality of 1.8 million pounds, or $2.2 million, is the newest meted out to the associate of Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019.

Mr. Staley is desirable the selection to a tribunal.

Why It Matters: A even further slide from grace for a when-highflying banker.

Britain’s Monetary Perform Authority stated that Mr. Staley experienced misled regulators and Barclays in 2019 about the depth of his ties to Mr. Epstein, whom he had retained as a client and adviser although doing work as an government at JPMorgan Chase.

For decades, Mr. Staley had been seen as a soaring star in banking, climbing the ranks at JPMorgan. In 2015, he was the initial American to be main executive of Barclays, a person of Britain’s biggest banking institutions. But Mr. Staley’s longstanding ties to Mr. Epstein came below scrutiny following the financier’s arrest on kid sexual intercourse trafficking costs in 2019. British regulators opened an inquiry in 2020 into how Mr. Staley characterised his marriage with Mr. Epstein. Mr. Staley stepped down from Barclays in 2021.

Final month, JPMorgan attained a private settlement in its lawsuit against Mr. Staley, who had been just one of the largest advocates for preserving Mr. Epstein as a consumer at the lender.

History: Mr. Staley had a longstanding ties to Mr. Epstein.

In a letter to Barclays and the F.C.A. in 2019, Mr. Staley claimed that he did not have a near marriage with Mr. Epstein, who was convicted 11 many years before on a prostitution cost involving a teenage girl. But in personal email messages among the two, according to the regulator, he described Mr. Epstein as one particular of his “deepest” and “most cherished” buddies.

Mr. Staley also instructed regulators that he had slice ties with Mr. Epstein properly right before getting Barclays’s chief executive — but officials found that they experienced been in contact as just lately as Oct 2015, when he was announced as the bank’s chief.

Barclays at first stood by Mr. Staley, expressing he experienced been “sufficiently transparent” about his connection with Mr. Epstein. Mr. Staley mentioned that he experienced been “transparent and open” with the bank.

“It is appropriate to avert him from keeping a senior posture in the economical expert services sector if we can not count on him to act with integrity by disclosing not comfortable truths about his near own connection with Mr. Epstein,” Therese Chambers, a major enforcement official at the F.C.A., said in Thursday’s statement.

Attorneys for Mr. Staley did not answer to a request for comment.