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A Deutsche Bank AG flag flies outside the company’s office on Wall Street in New York.
Mark Kauzlarich | Bloomberg | Getty Images
New York state financial regulators said Tuesday that they have slapped Deutsche Bank with a $150 million penalty in relationship to the bank’s dealings with accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the now-dead investor.
The New York State Department of Financial Services said that Deutsche Bank, which agreed to the payment under a consent order, “failed to properly monitor account activity conducted on behalf of the registered sex offender despite ample information that was publicly available concerning the circumstances surrounding Mr. Epstein’s earlier criminal misconduct.”
The department said that because of the bank’s oversight failure, the “bank processed hundreds of transactions totaling millions of dollars that, at the very least, should have prompted additional scrutiny in light of Mr. Epstein’s history.”
Those transactions include payments to people who were publicly alleged to have been Epstein’s co-conspirators in sexually abusing young women, and settlements totaling more than $7 million and payments to law firms of more than $6 million “for what appear to have been the legal expenses of Mr. Epstein and his co-conspirators,” the department said.
Other payments were made “to Russian models, payments for women’s school tuition, hotel and rent expenses, and (consistent with public allegations of prior wrongdoing) payments directly to numerous women with Eastern European surnames; and “periodic suspicious cash withdrawals — in total, more than $800,000 over approximately four years,” the department said.
The state said it was the first enforcement action by a regulator against a financial institution for dealings with Epstein.
Epstein, 66, died last August in a federal jail in Manhattan from what authorities ruled was a suicide by hanging after being denied bail in his criminal case.
Last week, Epstein’s alleged procurer and former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested on federal charges while holed up at a $1 million getaway in New Hampshire. Maxwell, 58, was later transported by authorities to New York City. Her first court appearance in Manhattan federal court is set for July 14.
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