Leading US senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Barclays Chair Nigel Higgins demanding urgent answers over what she claimed was the bank’s lack of action regarding ties between the bank’s former boss, Jes Staley and the late sex offender Jeffery Epstein.
The letter was sent on behalf of Congress members Ro Khanna and Raja Krishnamoorthi, the letter gives Barclays two weeks to answer inquiries about how they handled administration of data and knowledge regarding links between its former chief executive and Epstein who died while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
The key questions incorporated whether the bank performed any assessments of flaws in its executive hiring process which had allowed the board to recruit a CEO who maintained a deep professional network connected to a convicted sex offender.
The letter reads: “It appears that neither you nor any other member of the board conducted any deeper due diligence to verify Staley’s claims and simply took him at his word,”
The US lawmakers said the episode sparked questions about how the bank was managed. “Barclays’s apparent failure to meaningfully investigate or address Staley’s relationship with Epstein raises significant governance questions regarding the bank’s ability to hold senior executives accountable for wrongdoing.”
The US lawmakers expressed worries about information arising from a UK court hearing last year in which Staley failed to overturn the regulator’s decision to ban him from the British banking industry-a decision that had persuaded him to step down as boss of Barclays.
This letter was sent hours before Staley was set to face a closed-door deposition by the House Oversight Committee on which the letter’s co-signators, Khanna and Krishnamoorthi both sit.
For those unversed, Staley originally met Epstein in 2000 after he became head of JP Morgan’s private bank where Epstein was a consumer.
He took over as chief executive of Barclays in 2015 but was compelled to resign in 2021 after City regulators launched a probe into the nature of his relationship with Epstein.
Additionally, a spokesperson for Barclays said: “The UK regulator concluded that Barclays was misled by Jes Staley. We conducted an investigation based on the information that was available to us at the time.”
“Since then, the new information that was not available to Barclays that demonstrates Mr Staley misled Barclays and many others as to the nature of the relationship with Epstein.”
