Epstein Data Wiki

Paul Morris

Properties2
tagsperson, deutsche-bank, account-opening, kyc, 2013, 2019
aliasesPaul Morris, Morris, Paul, Paul Morris/db

7 min read

⚠ what this page is about, and what it is not

The Deutsche Bank relationship manager on the Epstein account, from its opening in March 2013. No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release, and none is made here. ⚠ Opening an account for a client is not wrongdoing, and the question of whether the bank should have taken Epstein on belongs to the bank, not to this page.

WhoPaul Morris, at Deutsche Bank; the release carries him under the bank’s internal address form Paul Morris/db1
In the release12,646 documents, 15,550 pages. ⚠ The second-largest uncovered subject the desk has measured2
His own messages6,058 sender rows across 4,469 documents, peaking in 2013, 2014 and 20152
⭐ The actOn 11 March 2013, four minutes after being asked, he set the Epstein account opening in motion: “Hi can you pull together a list documents we would need to open entity accounts, brokerage and a asset/custody account, we must have a standard list.”3
What came backThe bank’s own checklist, which for any person owning 25% or more of an entity required name, address, date of birth, SSN/TIN, photo ID, occupation, nature of business and “Source of wealth”3

Paul Morris is one of the highest-volume correspondents in the entire release. He is the bank side of the Deutsche Bank relationship, and his traffic rises and falls with it: light in 2011 and 2012, then 1,419 messages in 2013, 1,582 in 2014, 1,586 in 2015, tailing away after 2016.

11 March 2013: the account opening

The sheet is grand-jury material produced by the bank to prosecutors, and it is short.3

At 3:10 PM a colleague wrote to him under the subject “Account opening”. At 3:14 PM, four minutes later, he forwarded it to a relationship coordinator at Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, under “Classification: For internal use only”:

Hi can you pull together a list documents we would need to open entity accounts, brokerage and a asset/custody account, we must have a standard list. Thx

Her reply is the bank’s standard know-your-customer list. For any entity or person owning 5% to 25% of a company: name, address, occupation, nature of business. For any owning 25% or more:

  • Name
  • Address
  • Date of Birth or Incorporation
  • SSN/TIN
  • Photo ID
  • Occupation, employee name and address
  • Nature of business
  • Source of wealth

⚠⚠ WHAT THIS DOCUMENTS IS THE STANDARD, NOT A FAILURE. The bank had a checklist and its relationship manager asked for it on day one. Whether it was then applied, and what it produced, is not on this sheet and no document read for this page answers it. ⚠ The page does not say the checklist was completed, waived, or ignored.

⚠ Five years later the same institution’s internal correspondence carries the subject line KYC Breach_SOUTHFINANMD_Southern Financial, LLC, which is treated at Xavier Avila. This page draws no line between the two documents, because none is drawn in anything read for it.

What the 12,646 documents are

A count this size has been an artefact three times on this wiki, so the shape was measured first.2

  • 15,550 pages across 12,646 documents, 1.23 pages per document. 10,310 are typed as e-mail headers, then 1,017 bank statements, 442 equity swaps and 157 calendar entries.
  • ⚠ “Paul Morris” is a common name and the desk tested it. The dominant sender string is his, and 204 rows carry the bank’s internal form Paul Morris/db/dbcom, which fixes the identification to one institution. ⚠ The desk did not prove no second Paul Morris exists in the population, and that is a stated gap.
  • The names that recur beside his are Stewart Oldfield, Richard Kahn and other bank staff.
  • His last dated sender row is in 2020, after Epstein’s death.

What this page does not say

No allegation against him was found anywhere in the release.4

⚠⚠ NOTHING HERE SAYS HE DID ANYTHING IMPROPER. He is a banker who opened accounts for a client and asked for the compliance checklist while doing it. ⚠ Whether Deutsche Bank should have accepted Epstein in 2013, and whether its controls then worked, is an institutional question and it is addressed at Deutsche Bank. This page neither asks nor answers it, and attributes it to no individual.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Identification. ⚠ No document read for this page states his job title. The page calls him a Deutsche Bank relationship manager on the strength of the bank’s internal address form Paul Morris/db and Paul Morris/db/dbcom on his messages, and of the account-opening thread in which he directs a relationship coordinator. ⚠ A sister page was corrected this week for taking a title from a colleague’s signature block, and this page takes none. ↩

  2. The measurement. "Paul Morris" returns 12,646 documents across 15,550 pages, 1.23 pages per document. Corpus documents.doc_type: email.header 10,310 · financial.bank_statement 1,017 · financial.equity_swap 442 · calendar 157 ⚠⚠ The specialised financial doc_type labels are NOT reliable and these counts are not relied on anywhere on this page: the desk measured the classifier at 52% for financial.equity_swap and 5% for court.plea_agreement against a 40-document sample each, while email.header measured 100%. Only the e-mail figure above is safe to quote.. ⚠ The hinge is page scope: a document counts when any one of its pages carries the phrase. In the e-mail metadata store he is the sender of 6,058 rows across 4,469 documents, by year 2011 64 · 2012 169 · 2013 1,419 · 2014 1,582 · 2015 1,586 · 2016 984 · 2017 104 · 2018 67 · 2019 12 · 2020 1. ⚠⚠ THE NAME IS COMMON AND THE DESK DID NOT FULLY DECOMPOSE THE POPULATION. What fixes the identification is the bank’s internal address form, present on 204 rows. No second Paul Morris was observed, but the desk did not prove there is none, and no figure here should be relied on as excluding one. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. 11 March 2013. EFTA01448201 p.1, read at the image at 700 dpi. The chain: a colleague to Morris at 03/11/2013 03:10 PM, subject “Account opening”, copying a third bank employee; Morris to the relationship coordinator at 03/11/2013 03:14 PM, subject “Fw: Account opening [I]”, under “Classification: For internal use only”; and her reply carrying the checklist. Her block gives Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, 345 Park Avenue, 10154-0004, New York; no telephone, e-mail or personal contact value from this sheet is reproduced here. ⚠ The sheet is grand-jury material: it is footed “CONFIDENTIAL – PURSUANT TO FED. R. CRIM. P. 6(e)”, with an en dash as printed, and carries Deutsche Bank and SDNY production stamps. ⚠ The bank employees are named in the body only where they speak; the checklist is quoted from the sheet and “Source of wealth” is the last line of it, as printed. ⚠ The grammatical slips in Morris’s message (“a list documents”, “a asset/custody account”) are as printed and are not repaired. Further copies of the same thread exist at EFTA01448197 and EFTA01463075; neither was separately rendered. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Absences, each scoped. No allegation against him was found in the release read for this page. ⚠⚠ This is a very narrow check against a population of 12,646 documents and is stated as one: the desk opened one thread. It ran no systematic adverse sweep, searched none of the six derived stores, and opened none of the 1,017 bank statements or 442 equity swaps. ⚠ A subject with 4,469 authored documents inside a bank’s Epstein correspondence is owed a far deeper pass than this page has had, and a census of the related entity Southern Financial, LLC was running when this page was written. ↩

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