In the months leading up to Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges on July 6, 2019, a small U.S. Virgin Islands bank he owned that had employed no one and laid dormant for years suddenly came alive. A flurry of transactions totaling more than $20 million passed through the bank named Southern Country International from April to early July that year, according to a Miami Herald investigation based on the recently released documents by the U.S. Justice Department.
And months after the disgraced financier was found dead in a Manhattan detention facility on Aug. 10, an additional $25 million was moved through Southern Country, with roughly a quarter of that amount coming from unspecified sources. Southern Country ended 2019 with less than $500,000, leading Virgin Islands prosecutors who later sued Epstein’s estate to question in court where nearly $13 million the bank held in mid-December 2019 went in two weeks, according to the New York Times. U.S. federal and local Virgin Islands investigators had also jointly opened a wire fraud probe in 2020 into the mysterious transfer of $15 million to Southern Country from an Epstein account at Deutsche Bank in New York the day after the convicted sex offender died. But the investigation was closed four years later, a Federal Bureau of Investigation memo says. The memo does not state any findings or the reason for closure.
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/article316338915.html#storylink=cpy