cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/56273583
Shareholders sued Apollo Global Management and its billionaire co-founders Leon Black and Marc Rowan on Monday in a proposed class action for allegedly defrauding them for nearly five years about the private capital firm’s business dealings with disgraced sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
According to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, the shareholders alleged the defendants falsely denied in several regulatory filings in 2021 and 2022 ever doing business with Epstein, though Epstein “was heavily involved and frequently communicated with Apollo Global’s senior leadership” about Apollo’s business during the 2010s.
A class action lawsuit accuses Apollo Global Management of hiding years of business dealings between its top leaders and Jeffrey Epstein.
The suit, filed March 2 in the Southern District of New York, targets the alternative asset giant alongside CEO Marc Rowan and co-founder Leon Black. At its core, the case claims that what Apollo told investors and regulators — that the firm never did business with Epstein — was false.
Those denials began during an October 2020 earnings call, when Apollo’s Head of Investor Relations Gary M. Stein said the firm “never did any business with Jeffrey Epstein.” Black echoed that message on the same call. Months later, Apollo released the results of an independent review by Dechert LLP, which found that the firm never retained Epstein for any services and that Epstein never invested in any Apollo-managed fund.
Beginning in mid-2021, Apollo repeated those conclusions across multiple SEC filings, including its quarterly 10-Q reports and 2021 Annual Report on Form 10-K, each carrying Sarbanes-Oxley certifications signed by Rowan attesting to the accuracy of financial reporting and the disclosure of all fraud.
That narrative came under pressure on February 1, when The Financial Times reported that newly released U.S. Department of Justice files painted a very different picture. According to the suit, those files showed that Epstein had requested and received internal Apollo financial documents and had been in direct contact with some of the firm’s most senior decision-makers on sensitive business matters.