The Jeffrey Epstein Lesson in Overseas Asset Searches

We’ve written here many times about how tough (i.e. slow and expensive) it can be to track down overseas assets. In short, you need to be going after serious money to make it worthwhile, and you can often get clues to the location of offshore money right here in the U.S. That’s helpful if you have no idea where to begin looking abroad.

But as the Jeffrey Epstein case illustrates, even when you know where to look, it’s a daunting task.

So far, several hundred million Epstein dollars remain unaccounted for. What we know is that he had money in this or that company or account, but that money is long gone. We know he had associates who helped him, but they are either not keen to cooperate as they contemplate cutting their own deals, or else they were not doing anything illegal in helping Epstein minimize his tax bill.

And what we do know of Epstein’s overseas activity came with some extra help: some documents relating to Epstein’s activities were part of a massive leak to a German newspaper which sent them to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which maintains a very helpful search engine.

A recent Miami Herald story laid it out: “…a more detailed – but still very limited – look at Epstein’s wealth,” which included this: “From at least 2000 to 2007 Epstein was chairman of a company called Liquid Funding Ltd., which was initially 40 percent owned by the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns.”

So, the information is now 12 years old. The story continued: “Coupled with the fact that many of his businesses were operated in or with help from Caribbean offshore tax havens, the documents raise the likelihood that Epstein’s wealth is spread secretly across the globe.”

Epstein had as much as $3.46 million in some of the accounts long ago, but “this pales in comparison to his net worth — reported by his attorneys in court as $559 million — but suggests he had the ability to keep money in far-flung places. A check of the bank coding in the profile suggests that Epstein banked at the time with HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) SA in Geneva.”

You can see Epstein’s entry in the ICIJ database as well as the one for Liquid Funding. The ICIJ doesn’t release all the documents it has to the public, but journalists got a look at the 541 pages of Liquid Funding documents, and this is the best they came up with.

The New York Times reported recently that in 2011, billionaire Leslie Wexner’s foundation got a $56 million contribution from a trust linked to Epstein. But while the trust was listed as being under Epstein’s control in a Swiss bank account (again leaked via a French newspaper to the ICIJ), “it is not clear from public records who controlled Community Interest in 2011.”

Good start, long way to go. It seems safe to say that in the near future, any money Epstein’s victims can get will come from onshore assets.