December 26, 2025 By Lukas Hässig
Inside Paradeplatz, Zurich
This is a guest post by Lukas Hässig, a Swiss investigative journalist who runs “Inside Paradeplatz,” named for the Zurich square where the big international Swiss banks are located. An award winning reporter, he is famous for exposing Swiss banking corruption. He ran the Lucy Komisar exposé of the UBS stock trading scam when U.S. media was too afraid or too compromised to do so. This is his revelation of how UBS helped Ghislaine Maxwell launder her Jeffrey Epstein money. It appeared over a month before any American media wrote the story, and none of them as well.
HIS STORY
UBS finds itself in the middle of the Epstein scandal. Ghislaine Maxwell, helper of the girl sex offender, at Bank from 2014, in 2016 with USD 19 million: Multiple structures, delicate transactions until 2019.
Ghislaine Maxwell celebrated her 64th birthday yesterday. In prison. She has been there since her arrest in July 2020. She was discovered in her hideout, a noble country house in New Hampshire, north of Boston.
The approximately $1 million in cash for the purchase of the property in December 2019 – at that time Jeffrey Epstein already dead for 4 months – financed by a certain Montpelier Trust.
This Montpelier Trust had an account with UBS Financial Services in New York. This is coming out now that the Trump administration has released the “Epstein files”.
The timing is tricky. In 2019, the whole world knew about the crimes Epstein was accused of. He had forced countless girls and young women into prostitution.
Ghislaine Maxwell helped him for years and received a 20-year prison sentence in 2021. She is the daughter of the deceased under unclear circumstances media tycoon Robert Maxwell.
Ghislaine Maxwell is listed in several documents from UBS Financial Services, based in New York, as “grantor“ of the Montpelier Trust, as a foundation founder.
Maxwell’s sister, Scott Borgerson, Maxwell’s Ghislaine, as well as a secret husband, a Jeffrey Roberts, acted as “trustees”, meaning the vehicle’s administrators.
The latter is interesting. The Jeffrey Epstein case gets rolling with an award-winning Miami Herald journalist and one of her key witnesses, Virginia Giuffre.
Giuffre, like many other abusers, had sued sex criminal Epstein. Her full name is Virgina Roberts Giuffre.
The Montpelier Trust is just one of several vehicles that invest assets in the UBS Financial Services in New York, an important subsidiary of the UBS Group.
Other names listed in the Epstein files include Terramar Project, Max Foundation, Angara Trust, Ellmax – they all had accounts at UBS Financial Services Inc. at 299 Park Avenue in Manhattan.
The driving force behind all vehicles was Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime confidante Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell first showed interest in becoming a client at UBS Financial Services in 2014.
“15mm at JPM coming here“ is in an email dated January 16, 2014 under “Ghislain (sic!) Maxwell meeting recap“ and “Importance: High“.
It says: “10 is invested and 5 in cash (…) DOES NOT WANT ANY LOCK UP said that is why she is not married.“
JPM means JPMorgan Chase, which is the largest bank in the world. It had decided in 2013 to end its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Ghislaine Maxwell would transfer around 15 million (“mm“) from JPMorgan to UBS, of which $5 million would be in cash, the email states.
In fact, that’s what happened then. Ghislaine Maxwell became a client of UBS Financial Services in the summer of 2014. Over the following months and years, Maxwell brought a lot of money to UBS’s US subsidiary.
The large amounts flowed from 2016 onwards. At its peak in late April, the Epstein confidante had nearly $19 million with UBS Financial Services.
Some things quickly disappeared. In May 2016, Ghislaine Maxwell instructed her UBS Private Banker on the 25th floor of the Tower on Park Lane to transfer $2.5 million to Scott Borgerson – her “secret“ husband.
By this time, Maxwell’s role in the Epstein case had long been a major media issue. At the beginning of January 2015, the lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre, then anonymized under “Jane Doe“, came to public attention.
A photo showed young Giuffre with her arm around her hip from Prince Andrew – the then favorite son of Elizabeth, Queen of England.
In the background, a woman with red cheeks and a wide laugh looked into the camera: Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Court papers put daughter of Robert Maxwell at center of ‘sex slave‘ claims“, an important daily newspaper, the English Guardian headlined on January 4, 2015.
By this point at the latest, the world knew about Ghislaine Maxwell’s possible involvement in the Epstein sex scandal.
There was no change in the close relationship between Maxwell and “her“ UBS. Maxwell’s two account managers took care of this.
They come from the defunct Lehman Brothers, from which they moved directly to UBS Financial Services in the fall of 2008, when Lehman collapsed, where they now manage around 10 billion US dollars.
UBS did not respond to questions made Wednesday.
The NZZ for the first time two weeks ago mentioned UBS and Julius Bär as Swiss banks that would appear in the Epstein files.
What happened in 2019 is particularly sensitive for UBS. In early July, police arrested the suspect based on new articles about the scandal that portrayed countless girls and young women as victims of Epstein’s sex ring.
Epstein demanded bail – in vain. After an initial suicide attempt, the authorities ordered increased surveillance, which was then not followed.
On the morning of August 10, 2019 a prison guard found Jeffrey Epstein lifeless on the ground. He is said to have hanged himself.
Ghislaine Maxwell had long known what he had done for her. She went into hiding, became a hunted person for the police, her portrait emblazoned on mug shots.
In December 2019, the real estate company Granite Reality LLC for $1.07 million bought the property in Bradford NH, which goes down in the Epstein saga as Maxwell’s last refuge because of the inscription “Tucked away“ on a stone in the driveway.
Financing for the purchase was provided through the aforementioned Montpelier Trust. According to the Epstein files, Ghislaine Maxwell initially transferred $500,000 from her personal UBS account to the Montpelier Trust account in March 2019.
In June 2019, she sent the trust an additional $785,339. Shortly thereafter, Ghislaine Maxwell’s world collapsed. On July 8, 2019, the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York sent a communiqué entitled:
“Jeffrey Epstein Charged In Manhattan Federal Court With Sex Trafficking Of Minors“. Epstein had been arrested two days earlier.
“The indication unsealed today alleges that, between 2002 through 2005, EPSTEIN sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money“, the investigators wrote.
Although Ghislaine Maxwell was not mentioned by name, she knew what it had done to her. Because the prosecution made it clear that Epstein had helpers for his actions:
“Epstein allegedly worked with several employees and associates to ensure that he had a steady supply of minor victims to abuse, and paid several of those victims themselves to recruit other underage girls to engage in similar sex acts for money.“
For story on Inside Paradeplatz go here.