Epstein moved millions through mysterious Virgin Islands bank right before arrest
In the months leading up to Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges on July 6, 2019, a small U.S. Virgin Islands bank he owned that had employed no one and laid dormant for years suddenly came alive. A flurry of transactions totaling more than $20 million passed through the bank named Southern Country International from April to early July that year, according to a Miami Herald investigation based on the recently released documents by the U.S. Justice Department.
And months after the disgraced financier was found dead in a Manhattan detention facility on Aug. 10, an additional $25 million was moved through Southern Country, with roughly a quarter of that amount coming from unspecified sources. Southern Country ended 2019 with less than $500,000, leading Virgin Islands prosecutors who later sued Epstein’s estate to question in court where nearly $13 million the bank held in mid-December 2019 went in two weeks, according to the New York Times. U.S. federal and local Virgin Islands investigators had also jointly opened a wire fraud probe in 2020 into the mysterious transfer of $15 million to Southern Country from an Epstein account at Deutsche Bank in New York the day after the convicted sex offender died. But the investigation was closed four years later, a Federal Bureau of Investigation memo says. The memo does not state any findings or the reason for closure.
The Herald sent detailed questions to the U.S. Justice Department but did not receive any response. The Virgin Islands’ prosecutor’s office also did not answer the Herald’s questions. The Herald’s reporting provides the first full accounting of how Epstein used his obscure financial institution in the Caribbean — likely the first of its kind in the U.S. territory.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article316338915.html
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