Leon Black, then-CEO of Apollo Global Management, at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, May 1, 2018.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Former Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black, in prepared testimony for a House committee on Friday, said notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein duped him out of more than $60 million in financial advisory fees by falsely claiming that they were tax-deductible.
Black says he had no involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and did not pay him for access to women.
He said that he was misled by Epstein’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality in a prepared opening statement, which was shared with CNBC.
Black is set to be interviewed later Friday morning by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating Epstein’s ties to many wealthy and influential individuals.
“I come here today voluntarily to set the record straight about my relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and, in particular, why I paid him the money I did,” Black says in his prepared statement.
“Let me state unequivocally that I have never abused a woman,” Black says.
“I have never been with an underage woman. I have never engaged in sex trafficking. I have never paid Epstein for access to women,” he says. “I was never blackmailed by Epstein. I was not involved with, and had no knowledge of, any of Epstein’s heinous conduct.”
“I knew Jekyll. I didn’t know Hyde,” Black says.
In his statement, he leans on the 2021 findings in the so-called Dechert report , named after the law firm that was retained to examine how much he had paid Epstein for financial advice, the work that Epstein did, and whether he knew about Epstein’s conduct before his 2019 arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges.
“The Dechert report concluded that I had paid Epstein $158 million,” Black says, according to the prepared remarks.
“And Dechert examined the services Epstein rendered and determined that Epstein performed highly valuable and legitimate tax and estate planning services for my family office; that the tax work was responsible for billions of dollars in savings, and that all of Epstein’s work had been vetted by reputable law and accounting firms.”
Black said that Epstein had told him that the fees he was paying him “were tax-deductible, ’60-cent dollars’, which I only learned years later was not true.’
‘I.e. what I believed to be $95 million of net fees paid to him over five years was actually $158 million,” Black says. “But, at the time I was led to believe by Epstein that I was paying ’60 cent dollars.’ That assurance was false.”
Black says he met Epstein in the mid-1990s when Epstein was on the board of Rockefeller University.
“His network included respected luminaries such as David Rockefeller; Ehud Barak, Larry Summers; George Mitchell, Bill Richardson, and Ace Greenberg,” Black says.
He said he knew Epstein for 18 years “before I paid him a dime.”
Black says he began paying Epstein in 2013 for “his bona fide advice” on tax, insurance, and trusts and estates matters, subjects that he said Epstein possessed “remarkable acumen” about.
“With the benefit of hindsight, I now know, as does the world, that Epstein was engaged in horrific, sordid activities,” Black says.
“I feel terrible for Epstein’s victims.”
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