#Deutsche Bank hit with $150 million penalty over Jeffrey Epstein ties

New York regulators slapped Deutsche Bank with $150 million in penalties over its relationship with pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, officials said Tuesday.

The bank agreed to pay in a settlement with the state’s Department of Financial Services, which found it failed to probe transactions that should have raised red flags about Epstein’s sex-trafficking activity — including payments to his alleged accomplices, officials said.

“Despite knowing Mr. Epstein’s terrible criminal history, the bank inexcusably failed to detect or prevent millions of dollars of suspicious transactions,” DFS Superintendent Linda Lacewell said in a statement.

Deutsche Bank let those transactions go through even though it had plenty of information about the convicted sex offender’s criminal past, regulators said. Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida prostitution charges in 2008 before the feds accused him of sex trafficking last year. He killed himself in a Manhattan jail last August.

State regulators also found “procedural failures, mistakes, and sloppiness” in how Deutsche Bank oversaw Epstein’s accounts, officials said. For instance, bank officials placed restrictions on the accounts that were not communicated to staffers handling them and were misinterpreted in a way that didn’t change much about how the accounts were monitored, according to the DFS.

“Throughout the relationship, very few problematic transactions were ever questioned, and when they were, they were usually cleared without satisfactory explanation,” reads the consent order outlining the penalties.

Deutsche Bank — which has 10 days to fork over the $150 million to the state — said it offered to help law-enforcement authorities with their investigation of Epstein immediately following his arrest. The bank has also invested more than $1 billion in “training, controls and operational processes” amid the Epstein scandal and boosted the ranks of its anti-financial crime team to more than 1,500 people, a spokesperson said.

“We acknowledge our error of onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weaknesses in our processes, and have learnt from our mistakes and shortcomings,” a Deutsche Bank spokesperson said in a statement. “Our reputation is our most valuable asset and we deeply regret our association with Epstein.”