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Elizabeth Warren demands answers from Barclays over Jes Staley and Epstein
Warren gave Barclays chair Nigel Higgins two weeks to respond to questions about how the bank handled information on Staley’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein and its CEO hiring reviews.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren has written to Barclays’s chair, Nigel Higgins, demanding urgent answers about what she called the bank’s apparent failure to meaningfully investigate former chief executive Jes Staley’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
Warren said it was deeply unclear how Barclays, while supposedly investigating Staley’s link to Epstein, did not uncover what she described as a decades-long relationship. Her letter, also backed by Senators Ro Khanna and Raja Krishnamoorthi, asks how the bank handled information about Staley and Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges.
The lawmakers, according to the Guardian, gave Barclays two weeks to answer a set of questions that include whether the bank conducted reviews into deficiencies in its executive hiring process that allowed the board to hire a CEO with extensive professional and personal ties to a convicted sex offender.
The letter also points to concerns raised after a UK court hearing last year, where Staley unsuccessfully tried to overturn a regulator decision banning him from the British banking industry. The Guardian reports Warren cited Higgins’s admission that he did not ask Staley about the executive’s last contact with Epstein before Higgins told the Financial Conduct Authority it was well before Staley joined Barclays.