Regulators may punish Deutsche Bank for its Jeffrey Epstein ties | Hacker News Reader

Regulators may punish Deutsche Bank for its Jeffrey Epstein ties

nytimes.com

107 pointsAndrewBissell46 comments

Most interesting part is the last two paragraphs:

"While Mr. Epstein was a client of Deutsche Bank, his main business was Southern Trust Company, which generated more than $250 million in revenues during its existence, according to public records. Mr. Epstein created the company in 2013 and told government officials in the Virgin Islands that it was involved in DNA analysis and research.

Ms. George, in her civil forfeiture lawsuit, contends that Southern Trust was not in the business it claimed to be and that Mr. Epstein misled government officials in order to win a lucrative tax break. She told The New York Times in March that her office had not yet determined the kind of business Southern Trust was in."

What is Definitely Not Money Laundering For Sex Trafficking?

A darkly comical commentary on the state of justice right now: none of the child rapists will face any consequences (well, except for Epstein, though he did get away with it for decades), but the _bank regulator_ takes the accounting issues very seriously!

As Matt Levine always says, [at least] everything is securities fraud.

Bank and securities fraud are accompanied by detailed records, a fact which tends to make it a lot easier to demonstrate that something illegal happened.

Maybe because it's A German bank.

The amount of smoke and mirrors surrounding this entire case is incredible. It's sort of happening out in the open, with even the president seemingly involved to some degree, yet all details are conveniently hidden away. I'm expecting a somewhat chilling documentary 20 years from now on the subject.

Netflix recently released a documentary describing the survivors’ stories. https://www.netflix.com/title/80224905

it did nothing about the smoke and mirrors op is talking about. It revealed nothing on that front.

Nobody has ever satisfactory explained where Epstein got all this money to begin with. He seems to have been running some sort of blackmail operation ensnaring wealthy people into criminal activity and videotaping them or otherwise recording it.

His first job was as a math teacher at a _girl's school_ run by the current Attorney General's father, and he seems to have leveraged that somehow into an investment job through one of the parents at the school, despite having no qualifications for that kind of work.

It seems worth noting that he went from working with young girls to sex trafficking them, and that the man who supposedly was going to get to the bottom of his murder is the son of the man who first gave him access to young girls.

As far as I understand it, he basically acted as a proxy for Les Wexner (and I wouldn't doubt if he was blackmailing him to stay in that position based on some of the accounts of the assault victims) and just treated Les's money as his own. These grand ideas about vaults full powerful people on tape are a lot less plausible than him just taking advantage of a single billionaire to fund his lifestyle.

What was the point of the pinhole cameras recording everything that happened at every one of his properties, then? And what was contained in the cache of CDs with labels like "Young [name] with [name]" which the FBI recovered from a safe in his NYC mansion?

Your idea of the situation is also at odds with what the victims themselves have reported and testified.

... and then buried in a dark hole somewhere.

Once you become a front man for the intelligence agencies (yes, multiple) blackmail operations all normal accounting goes out the window. Part of it is probably from the blackmail, part of it probably from the agencies, he probably had a lot less control over it than it seemed I would venture to guess. Add in the normal organized crime angle and it's almost impossible to say.

His life has been under a microscope. If there was a smoking gun to be found, it would have been found. Nobody's opsec is that good, especially with number of people involved in the kind of conspiracy you describe.

They've been covered up, and the few reporters doing a deep dive are ignored and relegated to small corners of the internet. Whitney Webb being one of those.

....there HAVE been smoking guns!

But, that depends on 1) how complete your personal research has been 2) how strictly you define smoking gun

Sure is a lot of smoke. Lots. Don't you think some one should look in to this all a little before we decide "nothing to see here"?

Deutsche Bank doesn't let any dark business go by without a bite

Do you think anyone thought "If its this easy for me to launder money through DB, I wonder how easy it is for other people" and the corollary "What happens when the government realises every idiot and his dealer was using DB to launder money".

>Mr. Epstein created the company in 2013 and told government officials in the Virgin Islands that it was involved in DNA analysis and research.

This almost seems like he was acknowledging in a "wink-wink" manner the sexual nature of what was really happening.

DNA analysis and research requires a lot of talent and infrastructure and putting it on an remote island is not the best idea.

But calling engaging in sex "DNA analysis and research" is almost at the level of what passes as a joke in middle school. This almost seems like an inside joke between the Virgin Islands officials and Epstein about the true nature of what was really going on.

There might be more truth there than you think. One of the largely ignored and unacknowledged realities of the uber-wealthy elite is that they tend to be very interested in eugenics programs (of course under different names). Multiple people have stated that Epstein intended for his ranch in NM to be a place he had multiple women pregnant at a time so he could "seed the human race" with his superior genetics. Witness Maria Farmer says he and Maxwell and many others in the group were very open and serious about considering themselves genetically superior to the masses...

It's very common for the elite to openly reference what they're doing, crime-wise, because 1) It's easy to hide in plain sight, and 2) Who's going to stop them, you? Epstein's probably on an island right now.

It’s pretty well established that he’s dead.

Oh really. And do you have a source for that? How do you explain the strange happenings where he was being held? :}

If you’re going to go “there” don’t pass up on the name of the islands themselves.

That could be the genesis of the name, but Epstein was also known to espouse a lot of eugenecist and transhumanist views and had ties to geneticists like George Church. So another possibility is he originally intended to do the research and then wound up using the entity for money laundering or blackmail instead.

Here's my thesis: The company collected DNA from the girls he trafficked after they copulated with the rich and famous... He then generated revenue by keeping the results of the DNA analysis secret ( for a fee ).

Poor DB ... is there a crime they have not committed?

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