Darling refused Dimon’s Epstein-lobby bid
A US senator wants to know if Jamie Dimon leaned on the Treasury to kill a 2009 bank bonus tax, using advice relayed through Jeffrey Epstein.
British taxpayers had just put up £63 billion to bail out the banks when JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon rang the chancellor to lean on him over a tax on bonuses, part of a Dimon Epstein UK lobbying channel relayed through Jeffrey Epstein.
That is the account US Senator Elizabeth Warren wants Dimon to answer for. On Monday the Senate Banking Committee published a six-question letter asking whether Dimon or JPMorgan staff worked with Epstein to lobby UK officials against the 2009 bankers’ bonus tax, and whether anyone told Dimon to phone then-chancellor Alistair Darling and “mildly threaten” him. Warren has given Dimon until 24 July to answer. The letter is not legally binding.
The Dimon-Epstein UK lobbying trail
Darling introduced the one-off 50% tax on bonuses above £25,000 on 9 December 2009, a year after the bailout, expecting it to hit around 20,000 bankers. Emails released under the US Epstein Files Transparency Act on 30 January show Epstein pressing then-business secretary Peter Mandelson to narrow the tax. On 17 December 2009, Epstein asked Mandelson: “should jamie call darling one more time?” Mandelson replied: “Yes and mildly threaten.”
Darling’s own memoir records the call that followed. Dimon was “angry, very angry,” threatening to cut JPMorgan’s UK gilt holdings and shelve plans for a new London headquarters unless the tax was watered down.
Darling did not move. The tax raised roughly £2.3 billion, more than four times the original £550 million forecast. A US bank chief tried to talk an elected chancellor out of taxing his own bonuses a year after the public rescued his industry, and the chancellor told him no.
JPMorgan’s denial
The documents show Epstein and Mandelson discussing how to steer Dimon. They do not show that Dimon knew Epstein was the one steering him, and JPMorgan disputes he took any advice from Epstein at all. Spokesperson Patricia Wexler says Dimon “never met with him, never emailed him,” and has “never at any point” taken counsel from Epstein “directly or indirectly.” Dimon told a 2023 deposition he had “never even heard of the guy, pretty much” before 2019. JPMorgan settled with Epstein’s accusers for $290 million and with the US Virgin Islands for $75 million that year, admitting no wrongdoing, having dropped Epstein as a client in 2013.
Mandelson’s own Epstein ties cost him the Washington ambassadorship last September, after leaked emails showed him calling Epstein his “best pal.” He had written separately of wanting to “acquire enough knowledge and networks” to land deals with banks like JPMorgan.
Whatever Dimon knew, the tax he is accused of trying to kill still stands as the one time, in this whole affair, that Britain’s elected government held the line against Wall Street’s phone calls.
