[ad_1]
Leon Black, the billionaire collector and trustee at New York’s Museum of Trendy Artwork (MoMA), can pay $62.5m to the US Virgin Islands in a settlement to exempt him from authorized claims associated to sex-trafficking operations run by Jeffrey Epstein. Information of the deal was first reported by The New York Occasions on 21 July, following the paper’s request for public information from the federal government of the Virgin Islands.
The settlement was reached in January, after the Virgin Islands’ three-year investigation into Epstein’s actions at his properties on two personal islands there. The settlement doc notes how Black, who had long-standing social and enterprise relationships with Epstein, paid his good friend $158m for tax and estate-planning companies after Epstein pleaded responsible in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a teenage woman.
A spokesperson instructed the Occasions that Black “engaged and made funds to Jeffrey Epstein for reputable monetary advisory companies, which, based mostly on all the things now recognized, he very a lot regrets. In line with settlements of different main US banks, Mr. Black resolved the USVI’s potential claims arising out of the unintended penalties of these funds. There isn’t any suggestion within the USVI settlement that Mr. Black was conscious of or participated in any misconduct.”
Black, a significant MoMA benefactor, stepped down from his place as board chairman in 2021 amid the fallout from revelations of his ties to the convicted intercourse offender, the identical 12 months he withdrew from his roles as chairman and chief govt of personal fairness agency Apollo International Administration. (Final March, a New York court docket upheld the dismissal of a racketeering lawsuit Black had introduced towards his former employer, claiming he had been pushed out.) In 2022, he confronted allegations of raping a girl at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan; a New York state decide dismissed the federal lawsuit in Might.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 whereas in federal custody on sex-trafficking costs. Worker misconduct and negligence on the New York facility led to his loss of life, the Division of Justice concluded in June.
The Virgin Islands additionally sued JPMorgan Chase late final 12 months, alleging that the corporate was complicit in its former shopper’s crimes and benefited financially from the sex-trafficking operation. A number of the settlement cash, the Occasions reported, will go towards psychological well being programmes and efforts to fight intercourse trafficking within the Virgin Islands.
[ad_2]
Source link
