JP Morgan execs reportedly maintained contact with Epstein after dropping him as client

theguardian.com:

Senior executives with the global banking giant JP Morgan maintained contact with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for years after dropping him as a client in 2013, six years after he was charged with solicitation of a minor, according to a new report.

The allegation, reported in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, comes as JP Morgan, the world’s largest bank by assets, is being sued by an unidentified Epstein accuser and the US Virgin Islands – where Epstein owned a private island – for benefiting from human trafficking by ignoring internal red flags about his behavior.

According to the Journal, Mary Erdoes, who now runs JP Morgan’s $4tn asset and wealth management business, visited Epstein’s townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 2011 and 2013. Erdoes has previously said through a spokesperson that the only time she remembered “formally meeting” Epstein was the day she fired him as a client.

John Duffy, who ran JP Morgan’s private bank, also allegedly visited the townhouse in early 2013 a month before the bank renewed Epstein’s borrowing authorizations. A third JP Morgan executive, Justin Nelson, met with the disgraced financier about a half-dozen times between 2014 and 2017, the report said.

Some of those meetings have been characterized as concerning a multibillion-dollar donor-advised philanthropy fund Epstein had pitched to JP Morgan that could help bring wealthy clients in Epstein’s orbit to the bank.

But legal filings in the US Virgin Islands lawsuit appear to show that senior JP Morgan executives ignored pleas from compliance officers to cut ties with the financier, arguing that there was “lots of smoke. Lots of questions”.

“See below new allegations of an investigation related to child