Elizabeth Warren, the most senior Democrat on the US Senate banking committee, has sent a private letter to Barclays chair Nigel Higgins demanding answers about the bank's "apparent failure to meaningfully investigate" the relationship between former CEO Jes Staley and Jeffrey Epstein. The letter, co-signed by Congress members Ro Khanna and Raja Krishnamoorthi, gives Barclays a two-week deadline to respond. The core accusation is blunt: Barclays's board appears to have taken Staley at his word about the nature and timeline of his Epstein relationship, conducting no independent due diligence. Higgins himself admitted in a UK court hearing last year that he never asked Staley about his last contact with Epstein before declaring to the Financial Conduct Authority that the contact had been "well before" Staley joined Barclays. The board, according to the letter, "simply took him at his word." Staley met Epstein in 2000 when he became head of JP Morgan's private bank, where Epstein was a client. He became Barclays CEO in 2015 and was forced to step down in 2021 after UK regulators launched an investigation into the relationship. Staley was eventually banned from the UK financial sector for downplaying those ties — a ban he unsuccessfully challenged in court last year, a proceeding that revealed intimate details of the men's friendship and cost him £18m in forfeited pay and bonuses. The lawmakers are asking whether Barclays conducted any review of the "deficiencies" in its executive hiring process that "allowed the board to hire a CEO who held extensive professional and personal ties to a convicted sex offender." They want to know what specific actions, if any, the bank took to investigate the personal ties between Staley and Epstein during Staley's tenure. The letter carries an implicit threat. Warren and her co-signatories remind Barclays that operating in the US — where the bank holds approximately $200bn (£150bn) in assets — is a "privilege" contingent on "the ongoing character and fitness of management." The letter arrived hours before Staley faced a closed-door hearing by the House Oversight Committee, where both Khanna and Krishnamoorthi sit. Barclays's response follows a now-familiar script: the bank says it was "misled by Jes Staley" and that "new information has emerged that was not available to Barclays" showing Staley misled them about the relationship. The bank frames itself as a victim of Staley's deception rather than a participant in a governance failure. The structural question Warren is really asking isn't about one CEO. It's about whether a global bank's board can claim ignorance of a decades-long relationship between its chief executive and a convicted sex offender, perform no independent verification, vouch for that executive to regulators, and then deflect all accountability by saying they were lied to. The answer to that question has implications far beyond Barclays.
