Former Barclays Chief Questioned Under Oath Over Epstein Emails

The former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley has denied an allegation put to him by US lawmakers about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, according to newly released transcripts of a closed-door congressional interview held last month.

The interview forms part of an investigation into Epstein, who died in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges.

The exchanges at issue

The questioning centred on emails between Staley and Epstein on 9 and 10 July 2010, the substance of which has circulated in the media since 2021, in which the two referred to Disney characters.

Lawmakers put to Staley a further email, sent to Epstein by an unnamed individual on 10 July 2010, and asked him to account for the sequence. Staley denied that the messages related to him. "I have no idea who else she was with. I — it has nothing to do with me, though," he said. Pressed further, he said he "may have seen her in [the] apartment and prompted that email," while rejecting the underlying allegation.

A congressional representative, whose name is redacted in the transcript, told him the sequence was "pretty hard to believe."

Jes Staley was questioned last month about his email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. Photograph: Tayfun Salcı/Zuma/Rex

Why this remains a banking story

Staley spent more than three decades at JPMorgan Chase before joining Barclays in 2015. The relationship with Epstein began during that earlier period, when Epstein was a client.

That is what keeps the matter within the remit of financial regulators rather than confining it to a criminal investigation. The questions that have followed Staley through UK regulatory proceedings concern what he told his employer and his regulator about the nature and extent of the relationship — a disclosure question, distinct from the underlying conduct allegations he denies.

UK regulators have previously found that Staley misled them about his contacts with Epstein, a finding he has contested. The distinction matters legally: a regulator does not need to prove the underlying conduct to act on a finding that a senior manager was not straight with it, because candour towards the supervisor is itself a condition of holding the role.

The institutional issue

The recurring theme across every phase of this affair is that private banking relationships with wealthy clients operated for years with minimal institutional scrutiny of who the client was or what the association implied.

Epstein was a client of major institutions well after his 2008 conviction. The internal controls that would have flagged that — reputational risk assessment, senior manager oversight, periodic client review — either did not run or did not produce consequences.

Part of the explanation is structural. A relationship manager who brings in substantial revenue accumulates internal standing, and the committees nominally responsible for reviewing such relationships are staffed by colleagues weighing an abstract reputational risk against a concrete commercial one. That asymmetry is precisely what the senior managers regime was later designed to correct.

Why the transcripts matter now

That is the substance of what regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have been examining, and it is why the release of this material matters beyond the individual. The question is not only what one executive did, but why the systems designed to notice did not.

Staley denies the allegation put to him by the committee. The investigation continues, and the transcripts form part of a broader body of material lawmakers are still working through.