Mandelson leaked No 10 documents to Epstein – who then helped him pursue a $4m job

Two documents in the Epstein files show confidential Government emails being forwarded to Epstein in mid-2009. One of the emails was almost certainly forwarded by Lord Mandelson; the other doesn’t directly identify Lord Mandelson as the source, but the evidence suggests that he likely was.

The leaked material concerned live policy issues of clear financial interest to Epstein and his circle. After Labour lost power, Epstein helped Mandelson pursue a Wall Street role, with Mandelson looking to be paid more than $4m/year.

The background

In August 2009 the UK economy was still deep in the aftermath of the 2007–08 financial crisis, with the banking sector severely weakened and credit markets badly disrupted. Bank lending to businesses had collapsed: in the six months to February 2009, net lending by UK and foreign banks to UK businesses fell from £53.5 billion to just £8.6 billion. Small and medium-sized enterprises were hit hardest. It’s the reduction in lending that caused a financial crisis to become a crisis for the rest of the economy.

The August leak

Shriti Vadera was an adviser to Gordon Brown who played a key role in the UK’s response to the financial crisis. On 2 August 2009, she wrote a memo (in her characteristic capital letters) with proposals for pushing the banks to increase their lending. Ms Vadera sent it to other advisers in Number 10, plus Jeremy Heywood (the Prime Minister’s Principal Private Secretary) and Peter Mandelson (at the time a senior Cabinet Minister and Business Secretary).

Jeremy Heywood replied, talking about the importance of the non-bank lending market and securitisation.

This was a confidential discussion, which would have been of keen interest to Wall Street.

Four seconds after receiving Mr Heywood’s email, somebody forwarded it to Jeffrey Epstein (whose email address was [email protected]):

The sender’s name is redacted. It could have been any of the recipients, or someone they forwarded the email to. Whilst Peter Mandelson was one of the recipients of the original email from Ms Vadera, his name doesn’t appear on Jeremy Heywood’s reply – but the recipient list may be incomplete or redacted (or it could have been deleted).

The June leak

A few months earlier, Nick Butler, a special adviser to Gordon Brown, had sent an email to the Prime Minister with proposals for increasing private sector investment and improving Government finances. He suggested that, instead of focusing on spending cuts and tax rises, the Government should consider disposing of “saleable assets” that didn’t need to be in the public sector.

The email was sent to Ms Vadera, Christina Scott (Private Secretary to the Prime Minister) and Peter Mandelson.

Lord Mandelson forwarded it straight to Jeffrey Epstein:

Epstein responded two hours later asking what “saleable assets” Mr Butler was referring to. Lord Mandelson responded that he thought it meant land and property.

It seems likely that Lord Mandelson was also the source of the August leak:

• At the top of both email chains, the sender’s name has been redacted. In the August email this leaves the leaker unidentified. In the June email, Lord Mandelson’s name appears later in the chain. A key piece of information: the redacted sender line at the top of both emails is the same length, which is consistent with both emails having been sent by the same person.
• One small but telling detail is the time shown on the emails. In summer 2009, the UK was on British Summer Time, one hour ahead of GMT. The internal Government emails in these chains are correctly timestamped one hour ahead. But the messages forwarded to Jeffrey Epstein are timestamped at GMT, not British Summer Time.¹ That doesn’t mean the sender was abroad. Rather, it suggests the emails were sent from a personal email account or device set to GMT, not directly from a Government email system. In other words, these look like deliberate forwards from a personal inbox, not accidental leaks from an official one. Either both leaks were sent by the same person (Lord Mandelson), or Lord Mandelson and one other person independently used a personal email account or device configured to GMT. The former is plainly the simpler explanation.
• Also consistent (but of course not probative), both leaks were sent by someone who used a BlackBerry and hadn’t turned off the default signature.
• The fact the email from Mr Heywood was forwarded only four seconds later suggests that one of the direct recipients forwarded it. We rather expect Lord Mandelson was one of the recipients (it would be standard Government practice to “reply all”) and that his name has been omitted, redacted or deleted. However if that is wrong, and Lord Mandelson was not a direct recipient then he is surely in the clear; this is something Number 10 should be able to check.
• The Epstein files contain extensive correspondence between Lord Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein. There is no evidence that we are aware of that any of the other recipients on the August email chain (Shriti Vadera, Jeremy Heywood, John Pond) were in contact with Epstein.

The question can be speedily resolved by obtaining the unredacted email from the US Department of Justice.

It was four months after this that Lord Mandelson worked against his own Government, advising JPMorgan (via Epstein) to “mildly threaten” the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Was there a quid pro quo?

We know that in 2003 and 2004, Mr Epstein wired a total of $75,000 to Lord Mandelson:

Lord Mandelson says he can’t recall the payments, but hasn’t clearly denied receiving them.

A month before the first payment, Ghisliane Maxwell sent Lord Mandelson an email which might have included a request for his bank account number (it says she wants to discuss the “act. for the money”):

This was of course years before the email leaks. However at around the same time as the leaks, Lord Mandelson’s then-partner was receiving payments from Jeffrey Epstein to fund his osteopathy course:

However the really lucrative consequence of the relationship for Lord Mandelson was Jeffrey Epstein’s help in obtaining a high-paying job on Wall Street, after Labour lost power in May 2010.

In this email chain from July 2010, Epstein and Lord Mandelson discuss an offer from Deutsche Bank to hire Lord Mandelson for $1m/year base salary, plus a bonus of $3-5m:

Note how this isn’t just Lord Mandelson telling Jeffrey Epstein about the offer from Deutsche Bank – Jeffrey Epstein seems very familiar with it.

Lord Mandelson claims that Tim Collins (a prominent investor and Wall Street executive) had said Lord Mandelson was “underselling himself to DB at 1m”. This doesn’t seem to have been Lord Mandelson boasting; he was using Epstein as a sounding board – indeed, as Lord Mandelson said a year later, as his “chief life adviser”.

As Lord Mandelson said that same month to Epstein, “it’s about reputation and perception”:

Thanks to K for additional research.

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