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13th July 2025 02:15
Link to Post #1681
"In the years after Jeffrey Epstein registered as a sex offender, he closed his money management firm and started a business to develop algorithms and mine DNA and financial databases.
Then he set up a bank.
In a banking license application reviewed by The New York Times, Epstein described himself as one of the investing world’s “pioneers” and said he wanted to pursue the “dynamic discipline of international banking.”
Officials in the Virgin Islands, the U.S. territory where Epstein set up most of his businesses, approved a license for him in 2014 to run one of the territory’s first international banking entities, a specialized bank that can do business only with offshore clients. The approval was unusual, given Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender.
The bank, called Southern Country International, renewed its license for each of the next five years, but it is unclear whether it conducted any business or had any customers. Epstein, who died while in federal custody last summer following his arrest on sex trafficking charges, does not appear to have done any marketing for the bank or hired much staff.
The bank was created under a territorial law that lacked many of the oversight requirements banks are usually subject to, and its regulatory file is largely empty. A lawyer for Epstein told officials in the Virgin Islands in 2018 that Southern Country had not commenced operations. And regulators in the territory said they did not exercise oversight of the bank because it did not appear to be doing any business.
And yet, after Epstein’s death, his estate transferred more than $12 million to Southern Country, according to court documents.
On Tuesday, at a court hearing in the Virgin Islands on motions involving Epstein’s estate, a magistrate judge, Carolyn Hermon-Purcell, questioned the estate’s lawyers about the transfers to Southern Country, saying the disclosure was not satisfactory. The judge said she did not know why Southern Country would be receiving checks from the estate. “There’s no explanation for it,” she said.
A lawyer for the estate responded that some of the payment was made in error, but the judge was not satisfied with his response and asked him to follow up with a fuller accounting.
The checks — listed in the estate’s transactions for routine payments such as cable-TV bills and phone service for Epstein’s many properties — stand out. The list of payments was filed with Hermon-Purcell, who is overseeing his $635 million estate, including the possible establishment of a compensation fund for his victims.
That Epstein was able to get a banking license in the first place is unusual..."
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2020/...om-his-estate/
Last edited by Raskolnikov; 13th July 2025 at 18:14.
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13th July 2025 21:48
Link to Post #1696