Former Barclays chief executive Jes Staley has lost a legal challenge against a regulator’s decision to ban him from top City jobs over his ties to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2023, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined Mr Staley £1.8 million and banned him from holding senior roles in the financial sector after finding that he misled the regulator over the nature of his relationship with the financier.
The American challenged the ban and the fine at the Upper Tribunal in London, with his lawyers saying that he “never attempted to conceal his relationship with Mr Epstein”.
In a unanimous decision on Thursday, Upper Tribunal judge Tim Herrington and tribunal members Martin Fraenkel and Cathy Farquharson dismissed the challenge, but reduced the fine to £1,107,306.92.
Over the more than two-week hearing, Mr Staley, who ran Barclays from 2015 to 2021, told the tribunal that while he had a close professional relationship with Epstein, it was not a close personal friendship.
Mr Staley, who gave evidence at the hearing which ended in April, claims the last time he physically met Epstein was in April 2015.
In a letter to the FCA in 2019, approved by Mr Staley, Barclays claimed he did not have a “close relationship” with Epstein and their last contact was “well before” he joined the bank in December 2015.
But the authority found that the letter was misleading and that Mr Staley acted “recklessly and without integrity” by allowing it to be sent.
Lawyers for the regulator told the tribunal in March that Mr Staley and Epstein had a “friendship”, and maintained contact through Mr Staley’s daughter up to at least February 2017.
Leigh-Ann Mulcahy KC, for the FCA, said in written submissions that emails showed Mr Staley describing Epstein as like “family” and one of his “deepest” and “most cherished” friends, and that between March 2016 and February 2017, Mr Staley’s daughter, Alexa Staley, was used as an intermediary.
In written submissions, Robert Smith KC, for Mr Staley, said that his client “has never attempted to conceal his relationship with Mr Epstein” and that the letter aimed to “assure the authority that neither Barclays nor Mr Staley had had any knowledge of or involvement in” Epstein’s criminal activities.
He continued that it would be “entirely illogical” to conclude that Mr Staley would have approved the letter “if he believed that they were factually inaccurate or carried with them any risk that the authority might be misled by them”.
In a ruling, the tribunal said it “would have expected Mr Staley to have been particularly careful” in ensuring the letter was accurate, and that his breaches of FCA rules were “a serious failure of judgment”.
It added that they saw “no basis on which we should interfere” with the decision to ban Mr Staley, which was “a course of action reasonably open” to the FCA.
The judgment also said: “He (Staley) has shown no remorse for his conduct which has led to the authority’s investigation.”
Mr Staley acted as a private banker to Epstein during his time at JP Morgan, where he worked for more than 30 years before joining Barclays, which he left in 2021.
He had previously said he “deeply regrets” his relationship with Epstein, who was jailed for child sex offences in 2008 and was arrested again in 2019. He died in prison that year while awaiting trial for sex trafficking offences.
