Jeffrey Epstein appointed Jes Staley and Lawrence Summers as executors of his will

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what Trump’s second term means for Washington, business and the world

Jes Staley and Lawrence Summers were appointed by Jeffrey Epstein as executors of his estate, according to newly released doblockents that point to deep ties between the influential men and the late *** offender.

The roles given to Staley, the former chief executive of Barclays, and Summers, the former US Treasury secretary, were revealed among thousands of new doblockents published on Tuesday by the US Department of Justice.

The DoJ releases show that Staley was initially named in January 2012 as Epstein’s “successor executor”, who would ***ume responsibility for executing the disgraced financier’s will in the event that the appointed executors could not fulfil their duties.

Staley was listed as an “executor” in two further wills, dated September 2013 and November 2014. The last of these also listed Summers as a successor executor.

The cache also contained Epstein’s final will, dated from 2019, in which neither man is listed.

A spokesman for Summers said he “had absolutely no knowledge that he was included in an early version of Epstein’s will and had no involvement in his financial matters or the administration of his estate”.

Staley’s lawyer has been approached for comment.

In March, Staley stated in court that he had turned down a request by Epstein to name him as a trustee of his estate and sought to use the refusal as evidence that the two men were not personally close.

Under the terms of the will, the executors of the will and trustees of the estate are separate roles.

“Then we might say the fact that . . . I’d turned down being a trustee for his estate might be indicative that I was not a close personal friend,” he told the court.

The release of doblockents by the DoJ is the latest in a series of publications in the past week under the terms of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The law, enacted last month, ordered the department to hand over all uncl***ified material in the Epstein case. A series of Epstein’s wills were among the 11,034 doblockents released overnight.

Earlier this year, Staley failed to overturn a lifetime ban from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority after a judge ruled the former Barclays chief had “acted without integrity” by approving a misleading letter in 2019 that claimed he did not have a close relationship with Epstein.

The ban prevents Staley from holding senior roles in the UK financial services industry.

The former Barclays boss sought to distance himself from Epstein in court testimony by claiming he had a “close professional” relationship with the *** offender but that they were not friends.

In the 2019 letter to the regulator, the chair of Barclays notified the FCA: “Jes has confirmed to us that he did not have a close relationship with Mr. Epstein.”

Emails released by a congressional committee in November showed Summers’ continuing relationship with Epstein until 2019, when the *** offender died by suicide in a New York prison.

In response to those disclosures, Summers stated that he was “deeply ashamed” of the relationship.

He stepped back from public commitments, including being on the board of OpenAI, his roles at think-tanks and his teaching responsibilities at Harvard University, where he has been a tenured professor since 1983.

The latest DoJ release largely contained doblockentation related to the judicial proceedings around Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator who was convicted of trafficking offences in 2021.

One item included in the release is an Austrian p***port, issued in 1982, bearing an image of Epstein but under a different name. The doblockent was found in a safe in the late *** offender’s mansion, alongside 48 diamonds.

In 2019, Epstein’s lawyers said he “was given the p***port at issue by a friend. Some Jewish-Americans were informally advised at the time to carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally in case of hijacking.”

A prosecutor investigating Epstein identified an Austrian national of the same name as that given in the p***port living in New York.

They recommended attempting to contact the Austrian man and asking “if he has any reason to know why a p***port from his native country with his name on it would have Jeffrey Epstein’s photograph on it and be in a safe in Epstein’s mansion??”.

The FT has approached the man for comment.