British multi-national bank Barclays and its former CEO will reportedly have to face a lawsuit that alleges they lied about their ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The bank and its ex-CEO, Jes Staley, allegedly defrauded investors by lying or downplaying their relationship with Epstein as a way to protect Barclays’ reputation and shore up its stock price, Reuters reports.
-->The class action lawsuit – led by pension funds in New York and St. Louis – is on behalf of holders of Barclays’ American Depositary Receipts (BCS), which are securities that allow investors in the US to gain exposure to the bank’s shares that natively trade on the London Stock Exchange.
US District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong has ruled that holders of BCS, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), have plausibly alleged the defendants intended to mislead them about their relationship with Epstein.
Plaintiffs allege that the fraud ran from July 22nd, 2019, to October 12th, 2023, even after Barclays knew about an email cache belonging to Staley that categorized Epstein as “family.”
Bloomberg recently reported that Staley, as an ambitious new executive of JPMorgan’s private banking branch, developed a professional and personal relationship with Epstein that lasted from 2005 to 2015, even after Epstein was jailed and placed on a sex offender registry.
An email trove exposed in court showed that while working at JPMorgan, he and Epstein met regularly.
Because of his ties to Epstein, Staley has since been banned from top financial jobs in the UK by Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
