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Jeffrey Epstein appointed Jess Staley and Lawrence Summers as executors of his estate, according to newly released documents that point to deep ties between the influential men and the late sex offender.
Thousands of new documents published by the US Justice Department on Tuesday revealed the roles given to former Barclays chief executive Staley and former US Treasury Secretary Summers.
The DOJ release shows that Staley was initially named in January 2012 as Epstein’s “successor executor”, who would take over the responsibility of executing the disgraced financier’s will in the event the appointed executor could not fulfill his duties.
Staley was listed as “executor” in two other wills, dated September 2013 and November 2014. The last of these also listed Summers as successor executor.
The cash also contained Epstein’s last will from 2019, which does not list any individuals by name.
A spokesperson for Summers said that she had “absolutely no knowledge that she was included in an early version of Epstein’s will and had no involvement in his financial affairs or the administration of his estate”.
Staley’s attorney has been contacted for comment.
In March, Staley said in court that she had rejected Epstein’s request to name her as trustee of his estate and sought to use the refusal as evidence that the two men were not personally close.
Under the terms of a will, the executors of the will and the trustees of the estate have different roles.
He told the court, “We can then say that the fact that … I refused to become trustee of his estate may be an indication that I was not his close personal friend.”
The release of the documents by the DoJ is the latest in a series of publications over the past week under the terms of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Legislation enacted last month ordered the department to turn over all declassified material in the Epstein case. A series of Epstein’s wills were among the 11,034 documents released overnight.
Earlier this year, Staley failed to overturn a lifetime ban from the UK Financial Conduct Authority after a judge ruled that the former Barclays chief had “acted without integrity” by approving a misleading letter in 2019 that claimed she did not have a close relationship with Epstein.
This ban prevents Staley from holding senior roles in the UK financial services industry.
The former Barclays boss tried to distance herself from Epstein in court testimony, claiming she had a “close professional” relationship with the sex offender but they were not friends.
In a 2019 letter to the regulator, Barclays’ chairman informed the FCA: “Jess has confirmed to us that she had no close relationship with Mr Epstein.”
Emails released by a congressional committee in November revealed that Summers’ relationship with Epstein continued until 2019, when the sex offender died by suicide in a New York prison.
In response to those revelations, Summers said he was “deeply embarrassed” about the relationship.
He stepped back from public commitments, including his involvement on the board of OpenAI, his roles in think-tanks, and his teaching responsibilities at Harvard University, where he has been a tenured professor since 1983.
The DoJ’s latest release largely included documents related to the judicial proceedings surrounding Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislain Maxwell, who were convicted of trafficking crimes in 2021.
One item included in the release is an Austrian passport, issued in 1982, which bore Epstein’s image but under a different name. The document was found along with 48 diamonds in a safe at the late sex offender’s mansion.
In 2019, Epstein’s lawyers said he “was given a passport issued by a friend. Some Jewish-Americans were informally advised at the time to carry identification with a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally in case of kidnapping.”
A prosecutor investigating Epstein identified an Austrian citizen with the same name given in the passport as living in New York.
He recommended attempting to contact the Austrian man and asking “Does he have any reason to know why he would have a photograph of Jeffrey Epstein next to his name on the passport of his country of origin and why it would be kept in a safe in Epstein’s mansion?”.
The FT has contacted the person for comment.
