Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
Peter Mandelson: an unpunished friend of Jeffrey Epstein
There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
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AT the end of June, former Barclays boss Jes Staley failed to overturn a ban on him holding top City jobs because of his close and concealed relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Peter Mandelson, who also had a relationship with Epstein, has been rewarded with a job as British ambassador to Washington.
This is particularly stark because we only really know about Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein because of revelations thrown up by the investigation into Staley.
Up to 2013, Staley was a long-term high-flier at US banking giant JP Morgan, rising to become chief executive of their investment bank. In 2015, Staley was appointed group chief executive at top British bank Barclays.
Epstein was a client of JP Morgan. Epstein was a financial wheeler-dealer. He also sexually exploited and trafficked underage girls.
There are unproven suspicions that Epstein combined his business and sexual crimes, that he forced underage girls to give sexual favours to potential business clients at his private island in the US Virgin Islands, or his Palm Beach mansion or his grand New York house, or his private airliner.
The US Virgin Islands, angry about Epstein’s crimes being committed on one of their islands, launched a court case against JP Morgan, accusing it of covering up its relations with Epstein. In 2023, this lawsuit uncovered JP Morgan’s own 2019 internal investigation into its Epstein links.
JP Morgan launched its internal investigation, called Project Jeep (for JEffrey EPstein), to find out how exposed it was to lawsuits by Epstein victims. The Project Jeep papers, including many emails, showed Staley was very close to Epstein. The closeness was about business advice, gossip and friendship, with no evidence of any crossover with Epstein’s sex crimes.
Staley kept in touch with Epstein long after he was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Emails suggest Staley kept in touch with Epstein via Staley’s daughter when he got the top job at Barclays.
In 2019, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) started probing Staley’s relationship with Epstein. It was worried about a top City figure being associated with a disgusting criminal. Staley authorised a letter from Barclays saying Staley “did not have a close relationship” with Epstein and had stopped communicating with him before 2015.
The FCA said this was “misleading” — as shown by the Project Jeep papers. The FCA banned Staley from any “senior management positions” in finance in 2023, a ban which the former banker failed to overturn this June, thanks to what the FCA called his “lack of Integrity.”
But Mandelson also had a fairly close relationship with Epstein — we know a lot about that because he appears as an incidental character in the Project Jeep papers about Staley.
In 2009, Epstein emailed JP Morgan bankers boasting about his friendship with Mandelson, saying: “Well for all intends [sic] and purposes Peter Mandelson is now deputy prime minister.”
Other emails indicate Mandelson stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2009, while Epstein was in prison for a sex offence with a minor. Epstein also said Mandelson stayed with him in Paris in 2011 — when Epstein was a registered sex offender.
Epstein refers to him as “Petie” in emails to JP Morgan bankers. As with Staley, the implication is that Mandelson overlooked Epstein’s cruel and disgusting crimes in order to hang out with a financial “mover and shaker,” a “networker.”
The Project Jeep files revelations mean Staley is banned from top financial jobs in Britain. But similar revelations about Mandelson from the same files have been ignored when Mandelson was made British ambassador to Washington.
It looks like the City of London — for all the City tolerance of fraud, financial crime and exploitation — has a better moral sense here than the current leader of the Labour Party.
Follow Solomon Hughes on X @SolHughesWriter.
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