Yesterday, I debunked an alleged Irish connection to the Epstein Files, so today, let’s look at a real one as a palate cleanser. As I said in my previous piece, I’m mainly looking at his financial affairs, and I’m still in the early stages because I’ve been waiting until the final tranche of documents was released before I put too much energy into it. Most of the financial documents are pretty dense and it’s going to take a long time, plus the assistance of people who know more about finance than me, to investigate it properly.
In the meantime though, let’s talk about emails in the Epstein Files showing that Jeffrey Epstein was part of a consortium that sought to purchase distressed property and loan portfolios from AIB when the bank put them up for sale in 2011.
The deal was being brokered by New York real estate investor David Mitchell of Mitchell Holdings, in partnership with financier Todd Boehly, then of Guggenheim Partners. Mitchell reached out to Epstein in early 2011 to see if he had any interest in investing himself, and to see if he could get Peter Mandelson involved. One of the more detailed emails on the subject also claims the involvement of the Freshwater family, the British property billionaires behind Daejan Holdings. Discussions on the deal continued until at least September 2011, when a tedious back and forth between Epstein and Boehly’s secretaries led to an eventual follow-up conference call. At that point, getting Peter Mandelson on board was still on the to-do list, though nothing further appears to have come of the talks regardless.
All the same, I find this interesting for a couple of reasons, first and foremost of which is that Todd Boehly – current co-owner of, among other things, Chelsea FC and the Golden Globes – tried to put together a huge international business deal with Jeffrey Epstein in 2011, less than two years after his release from prison. I hope he faces a thorough grilling about this relationship, and frankly I wouldn’t mind if it somehow led to the fall of his horrible company Eldridge Industries.
The second is that since that conference call happened on 19th September 2011, my research brought me to a file that featured Jeffrey Epstein’s plans for two days later on 21st September 2011, the exact date it has been falsely claimed he met former Minister for Justice Alan Shatter in Dublin. Not that it needed any more debunking, but Jeffrey Epstein was in New York that entire week. On the 21st, he had dinner with Jes Staley, his best friend at J.P. Morgan:
The third is that it underscores my larger point in my previous piece, which is that if Jeffrey Epstein had interests in Ireland, they are overwhelmingly likely to have been financial. My preliminary searches of the Epstein Files have turned up a number of financial prospectuses for Irish-based investments. In email correspondence with his lawyer William Blum regarding the drafting of new financial services laws for the US Virgin Islands, Blum cites “how Apple/Microsoft et al. are being taxed in Ireland” as the model they wanted to replicate. There are several documents regarding the details of Apple’s tax deals in Ireland from different sources, including transcripts from a Congressional hearing about them. This is what Ireland is to the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world: the tax haven nonpareil, a shining beacon of hope for people already so rich the annual interest on their wealth eclipses what most people will earn in their lifetime.
Epstein’s only other evinced interest in Ireland seems to have been in the Northern Irish peace process as a model for Israel and Palestine, and even then, he seems to have been interested in the US and UK figures involved, not the Irish. To put it bluntly, I don’t think that Jeffrey Epstein had the geopolitical sophistication to realise Ireland could be useful to him as more than just a financial jurisdiction.
He was also enough of a weird race science eugenics guy that I kind of suspect he probably thought of the Irish as inbred savages who weren’t worth much to him. I suspected that before I ever read his texts about how our “horrible asses” are “genetic from the potato famine”, and I suspect it even more now.
Left in the Lurch 